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The Key to the Kingdom 


STUDIES IN THE BEATITUDES 


“fames Reid, M.A. 





George H. Doran Company 


THE KEY TO THE KINGDOM 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


General Preface > o2@ oe oc 


IE Christian life 1s a many-sided 

thing, as many-sided as life itself, 
since all life 1s meant to be Christian. 
Tt includes belief and conduct ; experience 
and hope; prayer and service; church 
and home and daily task; the joy of a 
divine revelation, and the upward climb 
of the loftiest ethic the world has ever 
known. And according to the history 
and environment of each soul who tries 
to live the life are the facets which Cbhris- 
tianity reveals and the problems 1t brings 
to light. These little books are intended 
to treat various aspects of this many- 
sided theme in a brief and interesting 
way, in a form pleasant to handle and 
attractive not least to younger readers. 


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Contents o om om 


CHAPTER 


I. 


II. 


III. 


IV. 


V. 


VI. 


VII. 


VIII. 


IX. 


THE NATURE OF A CHRISTIAN 


MAN . : ° ° ° 
THE POOR IN SPIRIT e ° 
THEY THAT MOURN. ° 
THE MEEK . ° ° ° 


THEY THAT HUNGER AND 


THIRST AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS 


THE MERCIFUL e ° ° 
THE PURE IN HEART e a 
THE PEACEMAKERS ,. e s 
THE PERSECUTED , ° * 


PAGE 


II 
37 
61 
81 


103 
127 
149 
171 
197 


we 


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= ae 


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ut 





‘ 


Cuapter I 


THE NATURE OF A CHRISTIAN 
MAN 


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HONG 
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4 





I. The Nature of a Christian Man 


HE Beatitudes form, perhaps, the 
most neglected part of the Sermon 
on the Mount. They do not indeed 
seem, at first sight, to have much 
connexion with it. Our inclination is 
to set them in a place by themselves and 
to pass on to what appears to be the more 
practical part of the teaching of Christ. 
Various reasons might be suggested 
for this neglect. One is that they are 
very hard to understand. The wisdom 
they teach lies very deep. It is true 
many of the sayings of Jesus cannot be- 
come clear to us till we are living by them. 
Only as we trust their guidance do we 
realize their power. But there are none 
of which this is so true as it is of these. 
We simply cannot take in the meaning of 
the blessedness of the Beatitudes till 
we are in the way to reach it. They 
belong to a world so far removed from 


II 


The Key to the Kingdom 


the world of the “man in the street” 
that, if he thinks of them at all, he thinks, 
of them as visionary and all in the air. 
The Western mind is essentially prac- 
tical. Mr. Stephen Graham says that 
the difference between West and East » 
is the difference between Martha and 
Mary. ‘The East finds its ideal in quiet 
meditative devotion; the West in duty 
and efficiency. Most of our people prefer 
the way of Martha to that of Mary, and 
find it hard to understand either Christ’s 
rebuke of the one or His praise of the 
other. Kipling puts the popular view, 
with its quiet contempt for thé spirit of 
Mary. 
The Sons of Mary smile and are blesséd— 
They know the angels are on their side. 
They know that in them is the Grace confesséd. 
And for them are the Mercies multiplied. 
They sit at the Feet—they hear the Word— 
They see how truly the Promise runs ; 
They have cast their burden upon the Lord, 
And—the Lord He lays it on Martha’s Sons ! 


These Beatitudes suggest to us some- 
12 





The Nature of a Christian Man 


thing too bright and good for human 
nature’s daily food. At the best they 
seem to offer a consolation prize for the 
defeated, a comfort for the heart-broken, 
a message for those who have failed in 
the struggle of life—a second best. Chris- 
tianity goes out, some think, to do the 
work of salvage on the red fields of battle, 
picking up the wounded and _ helpless 
and giving them for the future a quiet 
alms-house of the spirit where they can 
take their rest and recover a certain 
measure of happiness. Nothing could 
be further from the mind of Jesus. 
These Beatitudes were not offered by way 
of solace for the defeated. They were 
spoken to a group of strong, virile men 
whom Christ was sending out to turn 
the world upside down in His name. 
But more: so far from having little con- 
nexion with the Sermon on the Mount, 
they are the indispensable preface to 
all its very practical commands. They 
offer the key to the Kingdom. They ~ 
tell the secret of all its duty and service. 


13 


The Key to the Kingdom 


Matthew had the clearest insight into the 
Master’s mind when he placed them 
where they stand. That which follows 
is a closed book till we have mastered 
this opening page. For the point of 
view of Jesus is nothing less than this— 
that the duty laid down in the Sermon 
on the Mount, the way of life prescribed 
for those in the Kingdom are only possible 
to a certain type of man, and that the 
only type which is adequate to them, 
is that which the Beatitudes describe. 

It is a principle which we are quite 
accustomed to accept that every sphere 
of life demands its own type of person- 
ality. The Arctic regions demand one 
type of physical manhood ; the Tropics 
demand another. The men who climbed 
Mount Everest told us what difficulties 
they had to face in making adjustments 
with the high altitudes which they 
traversed. ‘They had trouble in breath- 
ing; the slightest exertion was pain. 
When the lamas from the same region 
visited Europe they had the corresponding 


14 


The Nature of a Christian Man 
kind of difficulty. They had to make 


adjustments with the lower levels. It is 
the same with spheres other than the 
physical. The rough work of the colonies 
demands its own type of character ; 
the delicate task of a diplomat at foreign 
courts demands something quite different. 
Half the failures in life come from putting 
round men into square holes. Tragedy 
was barely averted when R. L. Stevenson, 
with his artistic temperament and delicate 
frame, was set down to find his lifework 
in the office of a lighthouse engineer. 
The secret of success in any situation 
is hidden in the man who meets it. 

This gives us the clue to the message of 
the Beatitudes. Jesus was describing , 
there the kind of man needed for His 
kind of world. He was suggesting a 
contrast. The world of the materialist, 
whose crown is success, and where the 
strong and wealthy are counted happy, 
demands its own kind of qualities. It 
is not difficult to distinguish them. ‘They 
are obvious enough. We have only to 


15 


The Key to the Kingdom 


think for a moment of a man like Napoleon 
or, for that matter, of many another less 
striking, whom in their various spheres 
the’; world \) calls. successtullyaet he 
materialist’s world, if a man is out only 
for what it can give, will demand of him 
the aggressive spirit, the clever, calculat- 
ing mind, the heart not over-sensitive 
to the ills of others, the gift of self- 
confidence, the art of self-advertisement. 
He will need to get rid of some finer 
qualities which will be in his way. He 
will not despise any motive which can 
give him power either within himself or 
over others. The passion of hatred, 
the power of greed, the force of fear— 
all these are valuable to him either to 
kindle fires in his own blood or to use 
in imposing his will on others. He 
will need to learn to judge of success 
by what it brings in of money or popular 
esteem, and to find the centre of the 
universe in himself. This is not to say 
that he may not possess qualities which 
Christ valued, which life in the Kingdom 


16 


The Nature of a Christian Man 
will equally demand—the habit of fidelity 


to a task, perseverance and self-discipline, 
and the capacity, too, for taking pains 
to the point of sacrifice. It is indeed a 
question whether the successful man of 
the world, as he is called, does not sacrifice 
far more than the disciple of Christ. 
The difference between the two is not, 
as it is often assumed, that the Christian 
has to give up so much more than the 
other ; it is really a difference as to what 
is given up and on what altar the offering 
is made. Nor would one suggest for a 
moment that a man cannot be a success, 
even as the world uses the word, without 
being a man of the world. There are 
successful men who have also spiritual 
quality, who win success while caring 
little about it—win it even though 
sacrificing gain for principle. Moreover, 
‘men who have little interest in Christ- 
ianity are finding it less and less easy to 
pursue a policy of crude selfishness. For 
the spirit of Christ has so far influenced 
the world that selfishness dare not walk 


2 17 


The Key to the Kingdom 


abroad naked and unashamed. “ The 
strong man,”’ says Mr. Studdert-Kennedy, 
‘is not what he was. That strange man 
on the Cross worries him. He is uncom- 
fortable about Christ. .... Christ is 
making cowards of us all. We dare not 
do wrong thoroughly.” But generally 
speaking the distinction which Christ 
makes is valid, and to be a successful man 
of the world it needs the appropriate type 
of character. 

Just as much does the spiritual life 
demand the spiritual man. If we are 
to live in Christ’s Kingdom we must have 
His quality. That is the point which 
many people have missed as they study 
the Sermon on the Mount; and that is 
why the principles laid down there, 
and the line of conduct suggested, appear 
so hard to follow—even, to some, so 
impossible. To fulfil them demands a 
new kind of character, a fresh type of 
/man. The key to success in Christ’s 
_ world is a Christian personality. It is as 
' hopeless for a man to think that he can 


18 


The Nature of a Christian Man 


set out to follow the precepts of Christ 
without change of heart as that he could 
start to climb Mount Everest without 
previous preparation. For that expedi- 
tion much had to be got ready in the way 
of equipment, but the real essential 
was in the quality of the men themselves. 
So it is in the Kingdom of God. That 
is where Jesus always began with people 
—with themselves. When Nicodemus 
came to Him seeking to know something 
of His truth, Jesus told him that the first 
thing he needed was not to know, or even 
to do, but to become. When the rich 
young ruler came to ask Him for guidance 
as to what he might do to inherit eternal 
life, Jesus bade him give up his wealth. 
He did that, not because he thought that 
wealth was evil, but because in this case 
it was preventing a full surrender. When 
the man came to Christ seeking decision 
in a family dispute about property, 
Jesus went straight for the man himself, 
who valued rights more than fellowship, 
and thought more of property than 


7 


The Key to the Kingdom 


brotherhood. For no such man will find 
the right solution for his problem till he 
himself is changed. If we think, we shall 
see how reasonable this is. How, for 
instance, can a man face the sacrifice 
which love will demand till he has come 
to look with Christ’s eyes on the material 
things of life and, with His heart, to feel 
for others? Before we can loose our 
grip on the things that side-track us from 
the way of Christ, or make it terribly 
dificult to walk in, they must come to 
lose their attraction for us. How can a 
man fulfil the law of love to his enemy 
except as he has come to lose all thought 
of himself and his own hurt pride in a 
real concern for his brother’s good ? 
How can we cease from the struggle to 
lay up treasure on earth—the struggle 
that often makes life so bitter for ourselves 
and others—except as we have come to 
see that our real treasure is in the service 
we can render to others, and our real 
security is in the love of God? Half the 
strain of Christianity comes from trying 


20 


The Nature of a Christian Man 


to live the new life without possessing the 
new spirit. The plant reared in the 
tropics might as well be expected to live 
in the climate of a northern summer! 
That this new type of character is a 
necessary requirement for the new life 
becomes clearer as we study the Sermon 
on the Mount and find out what it really 
is. We have taken it for granted that it is 
a set of cut-and-dried precepts and 
regulations. But it is not that. None 
of the things we take for rules is See 
defined. “Love your enemies,” said 
Jesus, but what does He mean by love? 
Only the loving heart can tell. Till we 
begin to love with the heart of Jesus, 
the way of love in practical matters of 
life is veiled in mist. ‘ Love only com- 
prehendeth love.” Only the instinct of 
love can suggest to us what in any set 
of circumstances the way of love may be. 
Even where Jesus seems to be definite, as 
in the command to give to Him that asketh 
or voluntarily to carry a load for two miles 
when we are compelled to carry it for 


2I 


The Key to the Kingdom 


only one—a little reflection will show us 
that He is only, in striking form, illus- 
trating the working of a spirit by graphic 
pictures illuminating a point of view. 
The mere literalist misses the meaning. 
Flashes are being thrown up to enable us 
to see the country and the direction of 
the road—not rules to lead us in a blind 
obedience. ‘They suggest a spiritual art © 
which only the man who has caught the 
beat of its music will be able to practise. 
~ Christianity is a new atmosphere, and 
it takes new men to live in it. The 
climate of the country is impossible for 
us till in our measure we are breathing 
the air of the Spirit. Such new men are 
the true answer to the question, ‘‘ What is 
a Christian ?”? Not by what he thinks 
or knows or does does Jesus define a 
Christian man, as we often do; but, more 
~deeply, by what he ts. He is one who is 
meek, and poor in spirit, and pure in 
heart. He knows what it means to sorrow 
as Christ sorrows. He is one whose love 
to God and men is ever seeking to express 


22 


Lhe Nature of a Christian Man 


itself more perfectly in a right way of 
life. His is the merciful heart, and in it 
he carries God’s own peace, that he may 
create peace in the world. His task is 
to be a reconciler whose method is to 
reconcile men to one another by recon- 
ciling them in all their life to God. And 
as a consequence, while the world is 
what it is, he will meet with scorn and 
hostility from people to whom, like his 
Master, he will be a standing challenge 
and rebuke. 

There is a short story of Mr. Gals- 
worthy’s in which the two types are well 
illustrated in one phase of life. It was 
in the war-days, when the best and 
worst in men were revealed as faces are 
lit up in the glare of a furnace flame. 
One was the aggressive self-willed type 
of the man of the world. A fierce hate 
began to burn in his blood and he gave 
his whole mind and energy to a campaign 
for hunting out and interning people of 
German blood. One after another he 
pursued them remorselessly, and in that 


23 


The Key to the Kingdom 


passion old friendships were dissolved 
and kindly ties burned up. ‘The result 
of his success upon the man _ himself 
was devastating. His whole nature was 
poisoned, making one feel sorry for him, 
“‘as for a dog that goes mad, does what 
harm he can, and dies.” Among the 
objects of his zeal was the son of a 
former friend, a youth whose mother was 
British, whom he had known from his 
youth, and of whom there could have been 
no suspicion. He succeeded in having the 
boy taken from his mother and sent to 
an internment camp. ‘There the youth ~ 
fell ill, but recovered. And on his 
recovery he sent his persecutor a letter 
from the camp which ran as follows: “I 
owe you a deep debt of gratitude for 
having been at least partially the means 
of giving me the most wonderful ex- 
perience of my life. In that camp of 
sorrow—where there was sickness of mind 
such as I am sure you have never seen or 
realized—of poor huddled creatures, 
turning and turning on themselves year 


24 


The Nature of a Christian Man 


after year—I learned to forget myself 
and to do my little best for them. - And I 
learned, and I hope I shall never forget it, 
that goodwill towards his fellow-creatures 
is all that stands between man and death 
in life.” 

But Jesus not only outlined this new | 
type of manhood—He came to produce it. | 
That explains why His method was always 
to get alongside people. Mark tells us 
that He chose twelve men “that they 
might be with Him.” ‘That is the best 
illustration of His habitual way of 
working. He brought these men into 
His company that He might make 
them new men. His burning passion 
was to make men—His own kind of men. 
In some cases He had to remake them, 
where sin and wrong thinking and the 
conventions of a corrupt religion had 
mishandled them: like a battered coin 
whose image is defaced, they had to be. 
reminted in the crucible of His friendship. 
We can see the process going on in the 


case of the disciples. ‘They are quite frank 
25 


The Key to the Kingdom 


about their first days in His friendship— 
the blunders they made, their blindness, 
their selfish ambitions, their hotheadedness. 
How Peter had grown angry when Jesus 
first spoke of the Cross, how they tried 
to steal in front of their brethren in what 
they conceived of rank in the Kingdom, 
would have had Christ call down fire from 
heaven upon the rude Samaritans, and 
had even tried to drive the children away 
from Him—it is all confessed, with the 
grateful frankness of men who describe 
“the horrible pit and the miry clay,” 
when they know that their feet are on 
the Rock. It must have humiliated them 
to think over these days. They had been 
altogether wrong, and all wrong together, 
—wrong in their thinking, in their feeling, 
in their outlook, in all their ideas of what 
was worth while. But Jesus had changed 
them. Fellowship with Him had wrought 
something new in the very texture of 
their nature. They felt themselves to 
be a kind of new creation. It was not 
done easily. It took Calvary to do it. 


26 


The Nature of a Christian Man 


There were attachments that never 
snapped till then. There was a blindness 
that never lifted till the shock of that 
experience tore away the veil and showed 
them what sin is, what love is. ‘There was 
a pride that never broke till then, and 
they found how little, in their own 
strength, they could at up to the de- 
mands of love. But bit by bit we see 
them becoming stronger, more steadfast 
in loyalty, more loving, escaping from 
themselves and dropping old prejudices, 
till they were “‘ ready for all His perfect 
Will.” How it happened we cannot tell. 
It is not what He said merely. For 
“Christianity cannot be taught ; it must 
be caught.” It was Himself imparting 
Himself. ‘ Beholding the glory of the 
Lord, they were changed.” In that is 
His divine secret. In a recent article a 
writer describes how he first came to 
find his way into the beauty of English 
literature. One day his class in school 
was groaning its way through grammar 
and syntax, analysing a passage from 


27 


The Key to the Kingdom 


Milton, when the head master entered. 
He looked at the boys for a moment, then 
picked up a copy of the “‘ Paradise Lost ” 
and began to read. ‘The class listened. 
It was a revelation. “It was in that 
moment, I know, that for me the door 
opened into another world.” ‘The touch 
of Jesus is like that. All great kingdoms 
in life open to us through the contact 
with personality. Mother, father, teacher, 
friend, they are, all of them, doors into 
some region of the Spirit. ‘Truth becomes 
luminous for us again and again, only 
when we are in touch with some one in 
whose life it has become a flame of light 
and fire. There are people in whose 
presence the whole world becomes dark 
with despair ; there are others who bring 
us into an air in which doubt cannot live 
and in which all good things become the 

only realities. Not once, but again and 
again, has a man gone to a radiant soul 
for help in a moral situation, and found 
that the questions he had intended to 
ask fell silent on his lips, because in that 


28 


The Nature of a Christian Man 


presence they did not seem worth putting, 


or already had found their answer. The — 


presence of Jesus is like that. He is “ the | 
Door,” as He said. He lets us into the | 
new world—the world where love is | 
natural, where the things He values are | 
the true riches, and His truth the breath | 


of life. And He brings us into this world | 


by changing us, quickening the spiritual 


ee 


sense, giving us new eyes and ears and a | 


heart that beats with the love of God. 
For, after all, the spiritual country 
. where love and fellowship are the watch- 
words, and the way of Jesus is the path 
of life, is our native land. No man ever 
yet came under the spell of Jesus without 
feeling that he was a kind of exile return- 
ing home. Before he came into it, he 
might not have recognized that it was 
home. But now he knows that all the 
rest of his days he has been a kind of 
wanderer, that at last he has come to 
himself. Perhaps there is nothing we 
need to learn so much in this our day as 
that the way of life which Jesus revealed 


29 


The Key to the Kingdom 


isnatural. Christianity has suffered more 
than we realize from people who have 
represented it as something which cannot 
be lived by a normal man without loss 
of his ordinary human qualities. That 
is not how Jesus puts it. He described 
the first impulse of the prodigal, when he 
came to himself, as the impulse to go home, 
and the first cry of that moment of re- 
turning common sense as one that shaped 


itself into a prayer. It cannot be too. 


much insisted upon that when Jesus 
offered to men His way of life and laid 
down the principles on which a Christian 
man has to live, it was not that He had 
come down with some high-flown doctrine 
from another sphere as, say, a visitor from 
Mars might come to earth to persuade 
us to alter our life to one only fit for the 


_ peculiar physical conditions of that planet. 
|. He was revealing to men the real nature of 


the universe in which they found them- 


i 


selves. He was showing on what lines it 


| was planned to run, on what foundations 
/ alone we may safely build a human 


30 


ee eee 


The Nature of a Christian Man 


society, and on what terms alone we can 
find the secret of life. Sin and selfish- 
ness are not truly natural. They are 
the corruption of our true nature. The 
proof of it is that when men begin to live 
like the beasts they become worse than 
the beasts, when they adopt the ideas of 
the jungle the world they create becomes 
the worst of all jungles. And fear and 
greed and self-interest, the motives we 
use because we think they are the springs 
of power, are, to Jesus, just so much grit 
flung into a piece of delicate machinery. 
From this it follows that the only blessed- 
ness is the inward attitude to God and 
man by which we reach harmony within 
ourselves and peace in His world. No 
one can look around to-day and study 
current problems in the light of Jesus 
without becoming convinced that He 
alone can put into our hands the key to 
any progress that dare be called by that 
name. For He holds it. He alone can 
point the way to a better world. He 
alene can make the men who can make 


31 é 


eres 


The Key to the Kingdom 


all things new. Humanity on all sides is 
striving after conditions having a truer 
relation to that value of personality, 
which it has begun to realize through Him. 
But has it caught a real glimpse of this 
deeper need which He unveils—the need 
of the new personality for the new world ? 
There is no true advance in civilization 
other than that which in material con- 
ditions and human relationships, in home 
and industry, in national and international 
life, will show the spirit of the Kingdom. 
But only the men of the Kingdom—the 
men whom Jesus can make—are fitted to 
make that advance. And all efforts to 
change things which are not in their 
beginning and their end, also an effort 
to change men, is but a striving to no 
purpose. 

It is only as we are qualified by His 
Spirit to enter the Kingdom of Heaven 
that we can truly enter and possess the 
kingdom of earth. We have often held 
these realms apart, as if the choice that 


faces a man were between the earth and ~ 


32 


5 


i 
; 
FI 








The Nature of a Christian Man 


its satisfactions on the one hand, and, 
on the other, heaven with its order of 
blessedness. But in reality these are 
not two but one. For “ earth’s crammed 
with heaven,” and till we have realized 
it, and have reached, even here, the 
spiritual country, we are only feeding 
upon illusion. There is but one way of 
life through which we can find the 
meaning of the world and rightly use 
it. And only Jesus can lead us into it. 
Even the gates of earth are closed to a 
man who has not found in Him the key 
to the Kingdom of Heaven, for “all 
things are ours ” only in the measure in 
which “we are Christ’s.’ The true 
citizen of the world that now is, is the 
Christlike man. 


1 aan 


Nea eh \. 





Cuapter II 


THE POOR IN SPIRIT 





II. The Poor in Spirit <2 a 


“ Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs 
is the Kingdom of Heaven.” 


Sone of the things in life that are 
most difficult to understand are most 
worth understanding. That is often 
true of the words of Jesus; those with 
the hardest shell to break have the sweetest 
kernel. In this case the difficulty is 
to know what Christ meant by being poor 
in spirit. That is a hard thing for the 
man to understand who has not been 
there, but it is well worth taking the 
trouble to understand. For this con-' 
dition is the main key to the Kingdom 
of God. It is the attitude before which 
the gate of the spiritual life swings open 
to let us in. 

There are two versions of the beatitude 
—this one of Matthew and the other of 
Luke. Luke cuts it down to the simple 


37 


The Key to the Kingdom , 


phrase “‘ Blessed are ye poor,” an abridg- 
ment generally explained by his social 
sympathies. There is no doubt that 
Christ may often have used the shortened 
/ phrase. But He could hardly have meant 
\ to have set it down as a principle that 
‘poverty is in itself a blessing, or that only 
' the poor can possess the Kingdom. None 
knew better than He how debasing poverty 
can be when it has gone beyond a certain 
limit. There is a poverty that makes a 
man into a kind of animal, and turns 
life into a struggle for existence in which 
every fine thing is next door to impossible. 
And Jesus knew it. His picture of 
Lazarus at the rich man’s gate is too vivid 
a condemnation of life’s ghastly in- 
equalities for us to believe that Jesus 
gave His blessing to poverty as such. He 
would have been the last to fling a text 
to a starving man, and comfort him with 
the suggestion of spiritual riches. What 
He must have meant was that poverty 
need be no bar to a deep and genuine 
happiness ; and that, in point of fact, 


38 


The Poor in Spirit 


there are hundreds of people who are 
missing happiness by the very abundance 
of the things in which they seek to find it. 
As Jesus looked at the world, it was the 
peril of wealth of which He was most con- 
scious. His message has a constant under- 
tone of warning that, of all the gifts that 
come to men, wealth is perhaps the most 
difficult to handle and to subdue to the 
uses of the spirit. The only success of 
life is to be the master of your world 
for life’s spiritual ends; and whether a 
man be rich or poor, the only way to a 
real joy and satisfaction is to be delivered 
from the illusions of wealth and the lure 
of outward prosperity. Many of those 
whose lives have been richest in the things 
that count have been reduced to the 
barest simplicities; and have therein 
found freedom from the things which 
in other lives become a tyranny. The 
sweetest waters of human joy have some- 
times broken out from these bare lives 
like springs from a rock. When William 
Burns, one of the first missionaries to 


39 


The Key to the Kingdom 


China, died, and the box containing his 
belongings was opened in front of a little 
group of Chinese, they found he had 
literally nothing but a few odds and ends. 
And one of the group said in an awe- 
stricken voice, ‘‘ He must have been very 
poor.” Yet he had made many rich, and 
that kind of influence, according to Jesus, 
is the true wealth. His treasure had little 
of the gilt of earth about it, but it was 
the true gold of the spirit. 

But, in general, while all this is true, 
we cannot doubt that Matthew’s version 
is closer than Luke’s to the mind of Jesus. 
He was never one to extol an external 
circumstance in itself. Whether a con- 
dition is blest or not depends on how we 
take it. What kind of personality do 
we reveal in it? What kind of man do 
we suffer it to make us? Poverty may 
harden as well as riches, if we refuse to 
seek God in it. A lowly place may be 
filled with the hissing tongues of envy and 
jealousy, instead of the whispering voices 
of God’s love. It is the spirit within the 


40 


The Poor in Spirit 


circumstance that is the reality. What- 
ever our condition, 


The heart’s aye the pairt aye 
That makes us richt or wrang. 


It is what we are behind those locked 
doors where the soul keeps its secret 
that makes us rich or poor. And we may 
take this version as the truer to the 
Master’s message, ‘“ Blessed are the poor 
in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of 
Heaven.” 

What does He mean then by “ the poor 
in spirit.” We can be sure He does not 
mean the poor-spirited. That is the 
usual sense of the phrase. We think of 
someone helpless and dejected in the face 
of life. He cannot hold up his head 
against adversity. He will not resent an 
insult, not because he refuses to see it, 
but because he has not spirit enough to 
hit back. The food of his mind is his 
own self-pity, and there is no form of 
selfishness more unattractive. You find 


41 


The Key to the Kingdom 


nothing of that sort of person about Paul, 
or John, or Peter. None have ever stood 
up to the world more bravely than they ; 
for they knew that all the time, in spite 
of all its pride and cruelty, it was really 
helpless to do them hurt. Yet they were 
among the poor in spirit. What, then, 
did Jesus mean ? 

The best translation of the phrase 
is in what Jesus calls “‘ humility.” The 
poor in spirit are the humble-hearted. 
It is the condition in which a man is not 
concerned with his own attainments, 
his own knowledge, his own virtues, 
his own merits, his own goodness. If you 
were to ask him about them he would 
tell you that they are nothing, and he 
would mean it. To put it in another 
way : to be poor in spirit is the opposite 
of all that is summed up in the word 
pride, that assertion of self in its most 
subtle and poisonous form. Read through 
the Gospels and you will find that the 
thing Christ was out against in all His 
work was pride. The world has got very 


42 


The Poor in Spirit 


far away in its moral standards from the 
emphasis of Jesus. The Church has 
largely followed suit. Our scale of virtues 
and of vices has been too largely framed 
by the external needs of society. It is 
plain enough that a thief is the foe of 
society, and we have therefore no quarter 
for the man who steals. We condemn 
the breaking of the eighth commandment 
because we realize how dangerous all 
moral laxity is to the very life of society.. 
The standpoint of Jesus is miles ahead of 
all this. His insight goes fathoms deeper 
into the roots of moral disaster. He 
gave the first place in destructive power, 
to pride in all its various forms. And all 
the masters of the spiritual life who have 
learned to look with his eyes, have sup- 
ported Him. Dante has his list of the 
seven deadly sins, as they are called, and 
pride is at the head of them all. There- 
fore the proud occupy the lowest region 
of purgatory. As the poet enters into 
that lowest circle he hears them uttering 
the Lord’s Prayer, and there is no prayer 


43 


The Key to the Kingdom 


more humbling to a proud heart. As he 
walks he finds his feet treading a marble 
pavement engraved with the memorials 
of the illustrious proud who have learnt 
humility and so have escaped from pur- 
gatory. And as he leaves the place, by 
the steep stairway, his heart is cheered 
and comforted by the voice of one who 
sings this first beatitude, “* Blessed are the 
poor in spirit. ” 

The “ poor in spirit,” then, are those in 
whom pride in all its forms is slain. And — 
pride has many forms. One of them is 
the pride of possession—the pride of gifts - 
that come by nature or by Providence. 
This is a form of pride which is easy enough 
to overcome, if only we will look into the 
real situation. What is there to be proud 
of in that which is a gift? Why should 
it make a man hold up his head and feel 
himself superior to others because nature 
has given him either a comely form, or a © 
richly talented mind, or, least of all, © 
a larger share than others of material good. 
It is strange that anyone Should think 


44 


The Poor in Spirit 


himself somewhat because he has attached 
to his name a bit of land; or a balance 
at the bank; or even because he finds 
that there are things he can do or produce 
more skilfully than others. It is one 
thing to take pleasure in our gifts; it is 
another thing to find in them the occasion 
of pride, which is to attach to ourselves, 
who merely receive, the glory of the 
God who gives; and to use the things 
that should humble us in lowly gratitude 
to buttress self upon the throne. The 
message of Jesus is humbling enough. 
The true way to spell privilege is to call 
it responsibility. The right way to de- 
cipher the meaning of a gift is to see in 
it a burden and a call. We are stewards 
of all we have received, and the only man 
who can rightly use his gifts is he who is 
humbled before the feet of God by the 
weight of the task they bring. 

But there are other forms of pride more 
difficult to detect or to condemn.’ There 
is pride of knowledge, pride of achieve- 
ment, pride of character, pride of goodness. 


45 


The Key to the Kingdom 


That is where the foe gets most of 
us. It is in such things as these which 
we, or others, set to our credit that the 
enemy is most deeply entrenched. Look- 
ing superficially, it is difficult to see where 
pride of this kind is wrong. If we have 
fought our way against long odds, why 
should we not be proud of it? If we 
have laid low some temptation before 
which we might have gone down, why 
should we not rejoice in it and claim 
the right of self-congratulation? One 
‘reason is that all pride isolates us from 


others. That was Dante’s reason for 


putting pride at the head of his list. It 
was because, more than all other vices, 
it consists in a defect of love. It is the 


isolating thing. It spoils fellowship, and 
sets a gulf between us and our neighbours 


across which love cannot pass. It 


turns even our efforts to help others | 


into the patronage that stings and wounds. 
But the other reason is that it is not a 
true estimate of our value. The idol of 


self-esteem which pride fashions has feet 


46 


The Poor in Spirit 


of clay. It is a curious thing that all 
true knowledge humbles a man into a 
sense of how little he knows. The true 
scientist is not impressed with his own 
discovery. He is impressed with what 
his discovery reveals—glimpses and hints 
of an ocean of truth that is without bottom 
as it is without shore. Did not Socrates, 
the wisest man of his age, provoke his 
fellows to slay him by telling them that 
all he could do was to reveal to them how 
little he and they knew. The man who 
has done great things is always humble 
in the measure in which he is really great, 
for his true greatness is in his overwhelm- 
ing sense of how much there is still to do. 
And so it is also in the sphere of goodness. 
The finer a man’s spirit the greater is 
his insight into goodness, and the more 
his own virtues pale into insignificance 
before it. The true saints are always 
humble, because their sainthood consists 
in their vision of God, within Whose 
light their own goodness is but shadow. 
After all, what have we, even of such 


47 


The Key to the Kingdom 


frail rags of virtue as cover our nakedness, — 
that we did not receive ? No man can 
read what the modern experts have to say 
about the criminal mind, or track out 
the secret of some man’s failure, without 
being himself broken in humility before 
the sense of a grace that has somehow 
stretched forth a loving hand to him— 
the same Hand that Bunyan’s pilgrim 
in the Slough of Despond found mysteri- 
ously held out to lift him to his feet. 
“There go I, but for the grace of God,” 
is an old-fashioned saying, but it springs 
spontaneously to the lips whenever we 
look at someone who has fallen. For we 
know, when we are honest, that the same 
dark thing is in ourselves. Why is it, 
when we look at the scene on Calvary, 
that we do not blast with our indignation © 
the men who crucified Jesus? It is 
because we know that the same dark 
possibilities are in our own nature— 
that “ weak self-love and guilty pride.” 
When we turn our eyes to the Crucified, 
a light falls on us which makes us, with 


48 


The Poor in Spirtt 


all our boasted goodness, one with His 
murderers. There is somewhere a fan- 
tastic story of a painter who had the gift 
of painting his subjects, not as they 
appeared to the world or to themselves, 
but as they were at heart. The result 
was disastrous. Who is there who would 
submit himself willingly to such an 
artist ? ‘That, in point of fact, is why men 
flee from Christ, for in contact with Him 
we see ourselves as we are, and see nothing 
for self-admiration, nothing for vain- 
glory, nothing for pride. You remember 
Guinevere’s song, when at last the veil 
had fallen from her eyes, while she looked 
out on the snowclad, moonlit land : 


As these white robes are soiled and dark 
To yonder virgin ground, 
As this pale taper’s earthly spark 
To yonder argent round— ~ 
So shows my soul before the Lamb, 
My spirit before Thee. 


Read the “* Confessions of St. Augustine ” 
and you will see what it means to be 


49 


The Key to the Kingdom 


poor in spirit. Look through the prayers 
of the saints as you find them collected 
in some volume. Right down the ages 
runs the undertone of penitence and 
humility : “ Strengthen our weakness and 
defend us from the treachery of our un- 
faithful hearts”; “I fling myself, with 
all my misery and weakness, into Thine 
ever open arms.” So again and again 
run the litanies of the saints, and as you 
look at their names you see there men 
whose lives were aglow with a radiance 
that lights the face of history. ‘These 
are the poor in spirit, who have thereby 
the key to the Kingdom of Heaven. 

To be poor in spirit means to see our- 
— selves as we are in the light of reality— 
—the light of God, and so to be conscious 
of nothing except our need of His love 
and forgiveness. All the shelters are 
down. ‘There is nothing in us big enough 
to hide the soul from that light that 
searches us through and through. Nothing 
that we have is our own except the feeble 
will to be better than we are, and the 


50 


The Poor in Spirit 


desire to be what God would make us 
The man who is poor in spirit does not 
seek to justify himself, or to hold up his 
own good deeds for a screen against the 
judgment of love. He has given up the 
effort. He is facing himself and he knows 
he has nothing to say except ‘‘ God be 
merciful to me a sinner.” Even as to his 
future improvement he has no security 
in himself. Some people would like to 
have the demand of Christ upon us put 
into a bundle of little regulations and 
precepts. They have a feeling that they 
can keep them, and so maintain their own 
self-respect. That was what the Phari- 
sees were really seeking. They hated 
Christ because He swept away all their 
petty commandments in a love which 
asked so much that it condemned them 
at every point, and made for ever impos- 
‘sible a virtuous pride in their own self- 
made goodness. But the man who 1s 
poor in spirit knows that the infinite 
demand of love is for ever beyond him. 
As he stands in the light of Christ, he 


51 


The Key to the Kingdom 


knows he cannot reach any perfection 
that will satisfy his pride, and self becomes 
utterly dethroned. It was of this con- 
dition of need and dependence that Jesus 
said, “‘ Blessed are the poor in spirit.” 
How does that blessedness come ? 
For one thing, it is the blessedness of 
touching rock bottom. ‘There is a peace. 
in just letting go./ Many people find 
the spiritual life a perpetual strain. It 
is because they have what they call 
an ideal, a fancied perfection to which 
they must attain. ‘They see some virtue 
which they want to reach, so they strive 
for it by climbing, sometimes on hands 
and knees; and all the time it is just 
an effort of pride, though they may 
not know it. They are occupied in 
keeping up appearances, if only to them- 
selves. All this effort is vain. ‘* Which 
of you, by taking thought,” says Jesus, 
‘can add one cubit to his stature? 
Consider the lilies, how they grow; they 
toil not, neither do they spin.” And 
He is speaking of more than the care for 


52 


The Poor in Spirit 


earthly things: He is speaking of the 
care for character, of the strain after 
virtue which may be far more devastating 
than the worry about bread. And He 
condemned them both. How uneasy is 
the platform of our own merits and good 
deeds! What a frail screen is our reputa- 
tion! How many people are like a sailor 
facing wind and storm in a leaky boat, 
which all the time he has to be patching 
or baling out! ‘That is the position of 
a man who will not accept himself as he 
is and face the things which the light 
condemns. But what a new peace comes 
into the heart when we just let go! Mr. 
Galsworthy, in one of his short stories, 
tells of two men who met together and 
compared notes of their experiences. 
One was blind; but he describes how it 
had brought him a kind of peace. It was 
the last misfortune. “It gives you a 
feelin’ of bein’ insured like.” ‘The other 
had been in prison, and respectable 
society had made him an outcast. But 
he, also, had found, even in that experience 


53 


The Key to the Kingdom 


a kind of peace. He was no longer under 
the tyranny of its conventions and need 
no longer be the slave of the bubble 
reputation. His face had the smile of 
a man who has found a new security. 
The blindman asked leave to pass his 
fingers jover ‘it. Yes,’? he said, iaevie 
felt the lines of its confidence, ‘* same 
with you—touched bottom.” ‘There is 
always a peace in being set free from fears 
and false standards, whatever does it. 
There is a relief in letting go. But only 
the man who has seen Jesus and finds his 
pride so shattered that he has nothing else 
to trust to but Christ, finds the real rock 
which is the foundation that cannot be 
moved. 

For when we let go, there dawns the 
blessed fact that we are God’s children, 
that we have His love, not as merit but as 
sheer gift, and all we have to do is to 
respond to the leading of that love in daily 
life—not to struggle vainly after a fancied 
perfection. ‘This brings deliverance from 
all fear of the light, from all bondage to 


54 


The Poor in Spirit 


the world’s praise or blame, from all 
pretence to ourselves that we are better 
than we are. It is to fall into the arms 
of a Love who tells us the very worst, 
and yet gives us His fellowship through 
everything, to change and redeem us. 
Only the man who gets down to that 
position can see the amazing wonder of 
the grace of God. Forgiveness is a gift, 
or it is nothing. When a man is there, 
taking into his hands—hands emptied 
of all his good deeds—the love he knows 
he can never merit and yet need never 
lose, he is in the place where nothing can 
break his peace or steal his joy. And that 
is blessedness. 

And he is in the place of great achieve- 
ments, though he may not be conscious 
of them. For it is the place where that 
faith awakens which sees God’s will in 
circumstances and seeks to obey it, and 
where love to others starts in a new 
passion and a kindled interest which makes 
service not a duty but a joy. It is the 
place where the power of God is released 


aD 


The Key to the Kingdom 
and the love of God is set free through 


us, to translate itself into deeds of influence 
of which we are all the time unconscious, 
yet all the time assured, because it is all of 
God, with whom there is no failure. And 
that assurance is blessedness. 

Do not let us mistake this quality. 
Humblemindedness is not a craven thing. 
There are no such brave workers and 
fighters for truth and right as those who 
know that the power is not of themselves 
but of God. It is no mere depreciation 
of our gifts. Who can so enjoy his gifts 
and use them to the full as he who knows 
they come from God? A man may 
have wealth and honour and_ success 
beyond the dreams of ambition, and know 
it, and yet be poor in spirit. And above 
all, there is nothing of sadness about this 
poverty of spirit, as Jesus tellsus. For our 
pride is broken and it is through our pride 
that life can most deeply wound us and 
rob us of our gaiety and joy. 

It is good to read again Bunyan’s 
description of the Valley of Humiliation. 


56 


The Poor in Spirit 


This does not sound a very attractive 
place, and the descent into it is dangerous 
and may be very bitter. It was there 
that Christian met Apollyon and had to 
do battle for his life. The spot was called 
Forgetful Green, as Greatheart afterwards 
explains “ because he had forgotten what 
favours he had received and how unworthy 
he was of them.” And he was only saved 
when he was beaten to his knees so that he 
despaired of life. But when once a man 
has got rid of his pride in utter dependence 
on God, the valley is a beautiful place. 
“It is the best and most fruitful place in all 
these parts,” says the Guide. “Behold 
how green this Valley is and how beautiful 
with Lilies. In this Valley our Lord for- 
merly had His Country house. He loved 
to walk in these meadows, for He found 
the Air was pleasant. Men have met with 
Angels here, have found Pearls here, and 
have in this place found the words of 
Life.” Then, as they went, they heard 
the sound of music. It was no hectic 
music this, but the song of a boy’s heart, 


57 


The Key to the Kingdom 


happy and carefree. It came from a 
shepherd lad, a merry soul, who carried in 
his bosom the herb called Heart’s Ease, 
and this is what he sang: 
...He that is down, needs fear no Fall 
He that is low, no Pride: 
He that is humble, ever shall 
Have God to be his Guide. 


The man who knows the music of that 


song has found the secret of the Kingdom 
of God. 


58 


Cuapter III 


THEY THAT MOURN 





LIT. They That Mourn o > 


“ Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall 
be comforted.” 


li? is a very hard saying to take even 
from the lips of Christ. There are 
those indeed, who make a luxury of grief. 
Their favourite indulgence is self-pity. 
They take every chance they can of 
Tecounting their woes, till, with all our 
charity, we cannot help feeling that they 
enjoy it. It is indeed one of the tempta- 
tions of the self-centred mind to shut 
itself up with grief as in a prison and never 
let the glad world chase away the shadows 
with a smile. We can be quite sure 
Christ was not referring to that kind of 
person when he said, “ Blessed are they 
that mourn.” 
To whom then did He refer? Most 
people find it very hard to accept their 
sorrows—even to admit the right of 


61 


The Key to the Kingdom 


sorrow to enter their world at all. To 
the average man sorrow appears as sheer 
tragedy, unlit, save for those who have 
faith enough, by the faintest rainbow of 
hope. They find nothing in its dark 
heart for which to give God thanks or 
make them feel it was worth while to be 
led by that desolate road. If there is any 
comfort or blessedness in sorrow it is, for 
such, postponed to a distant future. 
They hope only to catch “the far-off 
interest of tears.” | 

That is about as far as most people get. 
The passages of Scripture in which 
sorrowing people find comfort are those 
which tell of the end of sorrow: “ There 
shall be no more death, neither sorrow, 
nor crying, neither shall there be any 
more pain; for the former things are 
passed away.”’ 

The ancient Saxons used to set their 
burying grounds on a hill-top whence 
they could look upon the sea in the 
distance ; for the sea spoke of the great 
beyond from which they had come, and 


62 


They That Mourn 


of the far-off home to which they re- 
turned. And for most of us as we stand 
by the grave of someone who has gone— 
our commonest experience of sorrow— 
the one thing that comforts us is the faint, 
far-off light of home, seen with the eye of 
faith. 

Now, of course, Christ would not have 
excluded this comfort of hope. It is 
Indeed part of the blessedness. In my 
Father’s house are many mansions; if 
it were not so, I would have told you.” 
But this word has something deeper. It 
Is the greatest mistake to imagine that 
Christianity has no victory in this life— 
merely a hope for the afterward. That 
were to turn this world, for many people, 
into a dull and empty corridor with a shut 
door at the end of it. The victory of 
Jesus and the message of the gospel is the 
power to see this world, with all it holds, 
as our Father’s house. Christianity is 
an alchemy of the spirit, whereby the 
hard and bitter stuff of experience is 
changed, here and now, into the very 


63 | 


The Key to the Kingdom 


nourishment of the soul. Christ has 
come to put into our hands a key to life’s 
experience, by which, in the darkest 
thunder-cloud, may be read the message, 
“ God is love.” ‘ There are various kinds 
of sorrow in life, various causes of mourn- 
ing. There is that which comes from 
sin, and that which comes from disap- 
pointment, and, commonest of all, the 
sorrow that comes through death. But 
for all there is comfort, and here and now. 
It is part of the secret of the Christian 
spirit that it introduces us into a world 
in which we can find a blessedness in 
mourning. 

First of all, there is a message here for 
those whose sorrows come from their 
own private trouble—the blow they . 
cannot escape. That is how sorrow 
generally meets us. At first we think 
only of its bitterness and pain. That 
takes up all our mind, and it is difficult 
to see anything at all except the blinding 
mist that fills the air and shuts out 
everything else. But even in this, if we 


64 


They That Mourn 


reflect on it, is there not something to be 
grateful for in the very fact that we are 
capable of mourning ? The saddest thing ~ 
in all God’s world is not a soul that } 
sorrows: it is a heart so dull that it is 
incapable of feeling grief at all; a heart 
so selfish, that nothing but what touches 
its comfort and its ease could move it to 
a twinge of feeling. For to sorrow means 
to love. Mourning is indeed but another, 
and a deeper, side of loving. It is affec- 
tion turned to pain, but it is affection 
none the less. Are there not those who 
have discovered for the first time, in 
sorrow, how deeply they loved? The 
hour of grief was the hour when love 
awoke from being a mere commonplace 
of feeling to become a passionate posses- 
sion of the soul. They did not realize 
how deeply they loved till one they loved 
was taken. Then the hidden fountains 
whose waters had been trickling almost 
unheeded through their life for years, 
broke the silence with their music; and 
as they thought of it they knew that this 


5 65 


The Key to the Kingdom 


sorrow was blessed, and in the wild agony 
of regret they possessed the riches of their 
love. “I think,” says a_ well-known 
writer, who has unveiled for us his own 
wounded heart, “‘ that those who have 
|e to bear sorrow will agree with me 
that bereavement is the deepest initia- 
tion into the mystery of human life, an 
initiation more searching and profound 
than even happy love. Love remem- 
bered and consecrated by grief belongs, 
more clearly than the happy intercourse 
of friends, to the eternal world. It 
has proved itself stronger than death.” 
But there is a wider range of blessedness. 
There is, for instance, the world of human 
sympathy. Other hands touch ours whose © 
tenderness we have never felt before. 
Other people in whom we had seen 
nothing are revealed as fellow-sufferers, 
bearing the mark of pain, and we are 
linked with them in this companionship. 
There are people whose prosperity shuts 
them up in a proud isolation. They 
know others suffer, but it means nothing 


66 


They That Mourn 


to them. They thank God, when they 
think of it, that such is not their lot, and 
pass on. But when they begin to suffer 
they begin to understand. The circle 
which closed them in has been rudely 
broken to let in a great human fellow- 
ship. The world which was so very 
empty, holding no one but themselves, 
begins to fill with friends. And in that 
friendship there is blessedness—a blessed- 
ness which is comforting. 

But there is still another kind of 
revelation. Yet another world begins 
to break into view. How many people 
are there who never thought of heaven 
till someone died. So long as they were 
prosperous, and life smiled, they were 
content. They had no need of another 
world and they had no eyes for it, for it 
takes need to give us the eyes. Then come 
the sorrow and the crashing blow. It 
may be failure or disappointment, it 
may be death : and the world is seen as a 
dark prison. But it has not suddenly 
become a dark prison. It has been a prison 


67 


The Key to the Kingdom 


all the time, though they did not know it. 
They have only begun to see it so. And 
then if they wait, and do not batter out 
their broken hearts against the impene- 
trable walls, windows will open—the 
windows that give out on eternity, through 
which a richer, fairer world will break 
into view. How many have had this 
experience in these last tragic years! 
Witness the clamant interest in immor- 
tality which has awakened in a multitude 
of people, and the panic rush to spiritual- 
ism to give assurance to it. How many 
people to-day can sing of “ Jerusalem the 
Golden,” for whom ten years ago it was 
only a bit of tapestry of pious imagina- 
tion! One of our minor poets describes 
the process of this change. An Easter 
day came to a man and stirred only a 
question, “Can the dead rise?”? He 
doubted, and with a doubt that had no 
fear in it, for he did not care. The next 
Easter day his boy was gone to the war, 
and he doubted still; but in his doubt 
there was a fear lest a future life should 


68 


They That Mourn 


not be true. But the third Easter the 
worst had happened, and now the doubt 
had gone; and in its place there was a 
fierce and passionate certainty which 
broke into a prayer: 


** T cannot let him die, 
Keep him for me, O Lord.” 


The walls were broken through and the 
mist had gone. A vision had opened of 
another world than this, and in that 
vision there was blessedness, and in that 
blessedness comfort. ‘This comfort, too, 
is deeper than at first appears; for the 
vision of another world is more than the 
comfort of a hope. It is the assurance 
of something deeper. It is the discovery 
that the universe is not material, but 
spiritual. ‘The things that seemed real 
are real no more. ‘The tinsel has faded 
from life’s pride and possession. Its 
ease and comfort are nothing but a 
shadow. By and by, if he holds on, the 
man who has gone thus far, will come to 


69 


The Key to the Kingdom 


see in Jesus a deeper view of life—that 
its true end is not in these things, not 
even in the peace of the untroubled heart, 
but in love and service; and the sorrow 
through which we feel this, and the 
suffering through which we are shaken 
out of our selfishness and out of our 
blindness and come to see the loving face of 
God the Father, are blessed. As a 
writer says, the sweetest experiences of 
life are like the honey in the heart of the 
flower, which the bee must press into to 
find. They come only through exper- 
jences which, at first, strain and repel. 
Wherefore let us face our griefs and dis- 
appointments so as to reap their joy. 


Who is the angel that cometh ? 
Pain ! 
Let us arise and go forth to greet him, 
Not in vain 
Is the summons come for us to meet him ‘ 
He will stay and darken our sun. 
He will stay 
A desolate night, a weary day. 


7O 


They That Mourn 


Since in his shadow our work is done, 
And in that shadow our crowns are won, 
Let us say still, while his bitter chalice 
Slowly into our hearts is poured, 
** Blessed is he that cometh 

In the Name of the Lord.” 


But in this beatitude Christ must mean 
something else than our own private 
sorrow or disappointment. For though 
He was speaking to the need of a great 
multitude, there are always some who 
have few great sorrows of their own. For 
one reason or another the angel passes 
by their door Is there no word here for 
them—nothing in their experience to 
which Christ can appeal? That were 
to suggest that the gospel of God’s grace 
is dependent on some stroke of circum- 
stance to enable it to find its mark. 

There is, however, a nobler sorrow, 
a finer grief, than even our private 
sorrow, however graciously the latter be 
borne. ‘There is the sorrow we can take 
upon ourselves, the sorrow of the mind 


ay 


The Key to the Kingdom 


which is occupied not with its own griefs, 
but with the suffering and sin of others. 
Christ is speaking here, not merely to those 
whom life has stricken, but to men and 
women who for His sake will refuse to 
keep their hearts in any shielded place, 
and in the name of love will go out in 
sympathy with others, to share their sorrow 
and to bear their sins. The burden 
which a Christian man carries is not first 
of all a burden on the shoulders—of 
labour and sacrifice. It is a burden upon 
the mind—to think out the source of 
others’ trouble and its remedy. It is a 
burden on the conscience—to know no 
peace while others live in a misery that 
we might help to cure. It is a burden 
on the heart which weighs it down and 
sets there—though only God’s eye may 
see 1t—the imprint of a Cross. It is in 
that voluntary sorrow that the power of 
real service takes its rise. Till there is 
that flow of sympathy in which our lives 
mingle with those we are seeking to help, 
the material help we give carries nothing 


72 


They That Mourn 


but a mechanical power to ease a difficult 
situation. It does nothing to help the 
man. Do we think ourselves into the 
situation of others? Are we as deeply 
concerned with their pain as if it were 
our own? Do we feel the stab of their 
shame and sin as if we ourselves had been 
found out in some dark dishonour? To 
do that is the secret of saving power. It 
is one thing to be indignant with the 
sin of another ; it is another thing to feel 
the shame of it, as if in it we ourselves 
had some part and lot. It is one thing 
to stand apart and be righteously angry ; 
it is a different thing when the sin of 
others wounds us to the quick, and we 
feel with them the pain of moral dis- 
grace. ‘Till society comes to feel shame 
like that when it reads its newspaper in 
the morning, the sorrowful story of crime 
and iniquity will do no more than add to 
its self-righteousness ; and all the punish- 
ment it can heap upon the sinner will 


Sleatpiteneaaae 


73 


The Key to the Kingdom 


which has no Cross at the Shake it. 
Christ had His outburst of moral wrath 
and righteous anger. He could use the 
scourge when it was needed, as we know 
from His denunciation of the Pharisees. 
But He Himself felt to the very root of 
His great soul the sting of their selfish 
pride, its dishonour, and its tragedy. 
We cannot understand the real quality of 
His indignation as He denounced the 
Pharisees till we have placed it alongside 
another picture and seen that the two 

are one. It is the picture of His weeping 
- over Jerusalem. “O Jerusalem, Jeru- 
salem, thou that killest the prophets, 
how often would I have gathered thy 
children together, even as a hen gathereth 
her chickens under her wings, and ye 
would not!” There were tears in His 
anger. There was mourning in His 
judgment. He felt their sin not as | 
violence to Himself, but as an outrage 
on the love of God, which is the essence 
of all sin. 

It is that kind of mourning to which 


74 





They That Mourn 


He calls us—the sorrow that comes from 
our oneness with our brothers in their 
suffering and their sin. This is the 
secret of our power to help them—this 
fellow-feeling in which we put ourselves 
in their place and stand out from our own 
sheltered isolation to face the wind and 
tempest of their need. 

And herein is the blessedness of mourn- 
ing and the secret of its comforting. For 
in sympathy such as this we come into 
living touch with God and are one with 
Him in His redeeming purpose and His 
task. It is there we find fellowship with 
God Himself. There, where the shadows 
deepest lie, we discover the secret of 
His presence; for the closest fellowship 
with God is the fellowship of His suffer- 
ings. And in that way of suffering sym- 
pathy, and the service to which it leads, 
we find the blessedness which is the very 
joy of God. 

In the first chapter of Timothy the 
writer speaks of “the glorious gospel of 
our blessed God.” ‘That word “ blessed” 


75 


The Key to the Kingdom 


is the same as this which Jesus uses, and it 
has the same significance. It is the 
glorious gospel of our happy God. That 
is Paul’s description of God. He is the 
happy God. And why is He Happy? 
What is the root of that joy of His—the 
joy of the Lord which becomes our 
blessedness ? Read the New Testament 
and you will find it in His redeeming 
purpose, His suffering love. That is the 
heart of the music which fills the heavens 
and rings through the starry places. 
God’s joy is in His task of travailing, 
redeeming love—the task in which He is 
one with His sinning world in its failure, 
in its tears, its shame—to bring it into 
the peace of a great saldvation. The 
secret of our joy is there, in fellowship 
with God in His redeeming purpose ; 
not in our ease or prosperity, or IN a | 
. selfish righteousness. And it is when we 
come out of our selfishness and open our 
| heart and mind to the needs and suffer- 
ings of others that we reach that fellow- 
ship, and find touch with this happy God. 


76 


They That Mourn 


There we break through to Him and find 
the fountain of that: hidden fellowship, 
and a kind of sorrow which becomes 
serene, transfigured, enriching. 


For him, the sorrows are the tension thrills of 
that serene endeavour, 


Which yields to God for ever and for ever, 
The joy that is more ancient than the hills, 


There are many people to-day whose 
trouble is the unreality of religious 
experience. They do not know God. 
He is not realto them. Is not the reason 
that they are not secking touch with 
Him where He is to be found—at the 
point where we go out of ourselves, and 
bare our hearts to the throbbing need of 
the world? God is not real, because 
life is not earnest to the point of sacri- 
ficial sympathy. If you stand on a plate 
of glass you can hold in your hand the 
most powertul of live electric wires and 
it will not stir a hair of your head, for 
you are protected from the contact with 


77 


The Key to the Kingdom 


earth which would give the electric 
energy a channel through your body. 
It is the very same with the great 
Christian truths, which hold the live 
current of love and power and joy. We 
need to touch earth if we would know 
their kindling power. If we stand on any 
insulating place of self-excusing or self- 
absorption, we can handle the most 
terrific truth without even the mildest 
sensation. Is not that the secret of a 
great deal of religious unreality to-day ? 
Are we opening our hearts to the burden 
of the world, letting it challenge us, 
question us, sting our conscience, quicken 
our mind to find a solution? Are we 
going out where Jesus is—without the | 
camp, outside the sheltered walls, bearing 
the reproach of a world gone wrong? 
There stands the open gate to a vital» 
experience of His fellowship. Only as 
we become one with Him in His cross do 
we become one with Him on His throne. 
Only as we reach the point of His passion 
do we reach the glory of His joy. 


78 





Cuapter IV 


THE MEEK 


Nae 





IV. The Meek o o o 


“ Blessed are the meek : for they shall inherit 
the earth.” 


ing of the beatitudes. It not only 
provokes our thought, but it awakens our 
opposition. None of these great sayings 
carries its meaning on its face, but this 
especially hides its secret so deep that we 
have to dig for it as for hid treasure. 
When the average man reads a state- 
ment like this he attacks it from two points 
of view. To begin with, he will deny 
that meekness is a blessed state. There 
is No virtue which is so universally sus- 
pected. The last thing the ordinary 
man would like to be known for is the 
quality of meekness. Most of us like to 
think we are people of some spirit. We 
believe in standing up for what we call 
our rights, not in “ taking things lying 
. 81 


“THs is perhaps the most challeng- 


The Key to the Kingdom 


down.” Meekness savours of something 
bloodless and anzemic—it suggests a milk- 
sop who will let the world trample on 
him. ‘The average man will deny that 
that is a virtue at all; or, if it is, then it is 
not a virtue he has any desire to attain. 
A missionary tells how he was trying to 
instruct a Hindoo student in the beati- 
tudes and in particular to explain the 
blessing of meekness, when the Hindoo 
retorted, “Sir, the Englishman may 
inherit the earth; but if you called him 
meek, he would be insulted.” 

And the man of the world will join 
issue with Christ in His claim that the 
meek inherit the earth. On the face of 
it, it seems to be denied by the facts — 
of life. If you would win success, you 
must assert yourself. The people who 
get on, are those who fight for their own 
hand and keep themselves well in the 
lime-light. The world generally takes 
a man at his own valuation. A sensitive 
and gentle spirit is the worst equipment 
for the battle of life, where the prizes are 


82 


The Meek 


to the swift and the victory to the strong. 
The great art of getting on is the art of 
self-advertisement. So runs the common 
creed of the world. In the philosophy 
which was popular in certain quarters 
before the war, we find this beatitude 
frankly controverted. “Ye have heard 
that it hath been said by them of old 
time, ‘ Blessed are the meek, for they 
shall inherit the earth,’ but I say unto 
you * Blessed are the valiant for they shall 
make the earth their throne.’ ” Such is 
the creed of the market-place and of the 
battlefield. And however much we hate 
the doctrine of the supremacy of the 
mailed fist in theory, are we not all more 
or less infected with its spirit ? 

The first mistake which people make 
lies on the surface. They do not under- 
stand the real meaning of meekness. It 
seems to mean being gentle in method 
and submissive in spirit to the attack 
of wrong or injustice; but that inter- 
pretation does not go to the heart of it. 
There is a meekness which is false and 


83 


The Key to the Kingdom 


worthless. If we are wronged or in- 
sulted, for instance, we may take it 
quietly for other reasons than the highest. 
We may not answer back because we are 
afraid of further trouble, or because we 
do not think it is the policy which will 
help our own interests. The best way 
to succeed may be to refrain from 
irritating our opponent. That is not 
meekness ; it may be cowardice or worldly 
prudence—a far different thing. On the 
other hand, we may let an injury pass 
because we are too easy-going, or because 
we do not feel deeply enough for the 
wrong to hurt us. That is not meek- 
ness; it may be moral indifference. 
There are people who cannot be insulted 
because they have lost the power to feel 
the sting of a moral reproach. Their 
standard is so low that nothing can 
possibly move them to indignation. ‘That 
is not meekness. It is moral atrophy. 
It is a diseased spirit which is benumbed 
against the sting of wrong. 


What then is meckness? It is the 
84 


The Meek 


spirit which accepts life and seeks to 
learn from it, without kicking at its ills 
or its rebuffs. It is the opposite of self- 
assertiveness. The meek man has ceased 
to care about himself or to think about 
himself. His pride has been crucified. 
He does not measure the importance of 
events by their relation to his personal 
comfort or happiness or self-esteem. 

This freedom from self-regard is the 
secret of the gentle spirit towards those 
who wrong or insult us. A meek man 
will feel the wrong and feel it bitterly, 
but it quickens no savage anger in his 
soul against him who has done the wrong, 
for he is not thinking mainly of himself, 
and is therefore not susceptible to 
wounded feelings or ruffled pride. If 
the insulting remark is true it will be 
little worse than what he has said of him- 
self to God in an hour of reality. “ Let 
him alone and let him curse,” once-cried 
David, when his enemy was flinging at 
him poisoned darts of insult which had 
in them more than a spice of truth, “ let 


8c 


~ 


The Key to the Kingdom 


him alone and let him curse, it may be 
the Lord hath bidden him.” There is 
sometimes a moral antiseptic in the 
sneers of others for which a meek man 
will even give God thanks. » But even if 
there be no truth in the insult and no 
justice in the blow, a meek man will still 
restrain the passionate protest, for his 
conscience is clear. He will rather be 
full of pity for one who can be so blinded 
by the storms of hate and passion. At the 
worst the bitter utterance or injustice 
will drive him back on the comfort of 
God’s own truth and love. That com- 
fort, that inward vision of righteousness 
and truth which is the smile of God, 
belongs to the blessedness of the meek. 
Stevenson tells how, travelling in the 
Cevennes, he came through the district 
of ancient persecutions, where, when 
cruelty was at its height, there was one at. 
least who, facing certain death and 
possible torture, could say, “ My soul 
is like a watered garden full of shelter and 
fountains.” ‘That inward peace and joy 


86 


The Meek 


is part of the blessing of the meek and 
quiet spirit. Truth becomes luminous 
to us when we stand for it in a dark time 
and “being reviled, revile not again.” 
That kind of meekness does, in surprising 
ways, inherit the earth, and come to the 
throne. It is the secret of victory. 


/ There is a power in a meek man, scorned 


and bearing the scorn in quietness, which 
comes at last to stagger and confound the 
adversary and lay him open to the truth 


‘and love he scorns. Truth has, in the 


long run, no other champion, and love 
no other way than the spirit which is so 
strong and sure of God that it will 
neither bluster nor drive, but “‘ hope and 
quietly wait for the salvation of the 
Lord.” 

But meekness concerns not only our 
attitude to others: it concerns our whole 
attitude to life. Meekness is the 
Christian way of meeting life and all its 
experiences—the opposite of the push- 
ful, thrusting, self-centred way, always 
out for selfish advantage, and reading the 


87 


The Key to the Kingdom 


goods of life in terms of possession, or 
position, or material comfort. One of 
the commonest mistakes we make is 
seeking to impose our own will upon life, 
We refuse to accept our circumstances 
and seek to know where the finger points. 
Instead of asking where the right way 
lies we set up some target for ambition 
and aim at it, or mark some spot on the 
summit of success and make for it—what- 
ever tangled thickets may lie in the road. 
It is our proud boast when we have 
attained, that we have bent things to 
our will. We have “ arrived.” 


I am the captain of my fate. 
I am the master of my soul. 


Or we may adopt some fancy of the 
kind of person we would like to be and 
strive to model ourselves on that, instead 
of asking, to begin with, what shape the 
unseen Potter with His tool of circum- 
stance and His loving design may be 
seeking to make us, or leaving that to Him, 


88 


The Meek 


and being content to follow, step by 
step, the way of love, like a ship sailing 
under sealed orders which are only 
opened from point to point. The result 
of this is fatal to any real satisfaction, 
even when we succeed; and when we 
fail, as most often happens, the process 
is one of disillusionment and heart-break. | 
It is a question whether the success of 
the self-willed thrusting their way through 
the world ,without fear or scruple to a 
peak of ambition, or the failure of those 
who find the world constantly thwarting 
their hope, brings the deeper unhappiness. 
The meek man does not face life with any 
fixed ideas of his own, or seek the good 
of life in his own advantage or his own 
success. ‘This great world must have 
a bigger purpose in it than merely to 
pamper you and me. The meek man. 
looks for that purpose and finds it in 
Jesus. That is his first victory. It is . 
the power, through his very meekness, 
to see the meaning of life in Jesus. What 
is that meaning? It becomes clear as 


89 


The Key to the Kingdom 


it opens out in the vision of God as Father 
seeking, amid all this tangled scheme of 
things, the good of each and all of His 
children. But just because He is Father, 
the good of His children which He 
seeks is not our comfort or our con- 
venience. It is our development as moral 
persons, with hearts to love and wills to 
choose the good, and minds to understand 
His purpose and serve it, and so, through 
all the machinery of circumstance and 
the furnishing of life, to become more and 
more capable of realizing our sonship with 
the Father and entering into fellowship 
with Him. To see that purpose in the 
world is the secret of meekness. ‘To see ~ 
God’s love and care for us through every- 
thing—how in all life’s tasks and trials - 
He is seeking our blessedness—that is the 
real secret of the quiet heart. What 
matter then( “the slings and arrows of 
outrageous fortune”’\ if the duty they 
bring and the discipline they appoint. 
have in them the very purpose of the 
Father’s love ? What matter the suffer- 


go 


The Meek 


ing and the shadow if all the way there is 
the gracious shepherding of God ! 

Do not let us, however, make any 
mistake. Meekness is not mere tame 
resignation to a kind of fate, or the 
passive acceptance of circumstance. It 
is an obvious fact that the same situation 
may suggest quite different things to 
one man from what it suggests to another. 
Our circumstances colour life without a 
doubt, but it is we who choose the colour. 
What is for one man a blank wall to turn 
him back will be to another a challenge 
to scale it or break through. Meekness 
is quiet, because it knows that all that 
happens brings its message, and yields 
its fruit, and opens out some way of op- 
portunity. The way may be one of 
battle, but in any case it will be one of 
divinely ordered duty ; and only in quiet- 
ness and in confidence, while the glare of 
the sun is overhead or the storm whistles 
through the valley, can the true way be 
seen. Meekness is thus no mere want 


of blood and spirit. Look through his- 
gl 


The Key to the Kingdom 


tory, and the really meek people have often 
“been the biggest fighters for right, the 
_ finest heroes of the truth. Was anyone so 
terrible as Moses, and yet it was written 
of him that “ this man, Moses, was meek, 
above all other men who dwell on the 
face of the earth”? ? Meekness leashed 
his strength. It imprisoned his volcanic 
fire to uge it for the ends of the kingdom, 
as cordite which becomes explosive only 
when it is confined. Meekness neither 
broke his spirit nor put out the flame. 
Abraham Lincoln was of the meek in 
spirit. His attitude was well expressed 
in an address as candidate for the Presi- 
dency: *‘ I know there is a God and that 
He hates injustice and slavery. I see the 
storm coming and I know His hand is 
init. If He has a place and work for me, 
and I believe He has, I am ready. I am 
nothing, but truth is everything.” But 
with that spirit Lincoln was the very in- 
carnation of strength. A strong man 
is all the stronger when meekness lifts 
- him out of himself. He is by that very 


g2 


The Meek 


thing delivered from fears and from 
vanity and all that lays on us the finger of 
prudence and selfish regard. Who was 
so terrible as Christ, when He saw the 
way through the opposing currents? 
Who so heroic and full of spirit as when 
He rode into Jerusalem—to a Cross which 
He saw there athwart the skyline? Yet 
He said of Himself, “ I am meek and lowly 
in heart.” His very strength and courage 
was in His meekness. His rest of heart 
was the secret of His energy. He knew 
the secret of the quiet mind—the blessing 
of the meek, | 

But come now to the second part of 
the verse— for they shall inherit the 
earth.” That statement is perhaps the 
most fiercely contested. Some will grant 
that meekness is a beautiful and fragrant 
virtue, but they will deny that the meek 
inherit the earth, or anything like it. 
Experience proves the reverse, they will 
say. It is the strong, the mighty, the 
‘self-assertive who are in the seats of posses- 
sion and power. The meek may have 


93 


The Key to the Kingdom 


their heaven beyond, or their own little 
private heaven in their souls even now. 
But that they inherit the earth—oh, no! 
Is not the very contrary of this the stand- 
ing problem of the Old Testament saints 
—the total inconsistency of things? Let 
us, however, come to grips with this 
matter. Look closely at the hustler, — 
the self-assertive man, who in the eyes of | 
the world seems to inherit the earth, or, 
at all events, a big proportion of it. What 
has he got after all? “I imagined I was 
buying pleasure,” said a wealthy man to 
a well-known doctor whom he was con- 
sulting for a nervous breakdown, “ and I 
discovered I was only buying anxiety.” 
How much does anyone really get out of 
possessions ? Only so much as his mind 
and spirit can take in of the spiritual 
quality of things. Take the man who 
goes in for money and comfort and 
position as the chief good of life. Does 
he really possess what he owns? Does 
he really get out of it as much as he 
pretends? Does he not often confess 


94 


The Meek 


in his heart that “ the game is not worth 
the candle?” A successful man com- 
plained the other day, “ The worst of it is 
that when you have reached your ambi- 
tion, you come to it too tired to enjoy it,” 
which is surely a sign that that which has 
in it no real joy and satisfaction when one 
has got it, and for which, to get it, life 
has been turned into a kind of cockpit 
struggle cannot be the real meaning of 
life. Look at our civilization, in which 
the gifts of invention and industry are 
supposed to enable us to inherit the earth. 
_Is there any reality behind it all? A 
well-known Hindoo puts this question 
after a stay of five years in Europe, “ What 
is this civilization anyhow?” he asks. 
“I have lived in four of its chief centres 
and have studied it with the little light 
I have, and I confess that the study has 
deeply pained me. This vaunted civili- 
zation has raised selfishness to a religious 
creed, mammon to the throne of God, 
adulteration to a science, and falsehood to 
a fine art. It has created artificial wants 


95 


The Key to the Kingdom 


for man and made him the slave of work 
to satisfy them ; it has made him restless 
without and within, and robbed him of 
leisure, the only friend of high thought. 
He knows no peace, hence he knows not 
himself nor the real object of life. It» 
has made him a breathing, fighting, 
hustling, spinning, machine.” That is 
a view worth pondering. Can anyone 
doubt that there is truth in its verdict on 
our age and on its claim to inherit the 
earth by mere dexterity of brain and power 
_of material possession? How can we 
find the good, even of life’s material 
things, save as we see its real meaning 
in the purpose of God and in the service 
of one another; and discover in all its 
joys that which Jesus found in a desert 
flower—the loving care and creative 
Providence of the Father? But this 
demands the meek and quiet spirit, 
willing to see, to wonder, and to conse- 
crate. 

Life’s material gains are a very small 
part of life even for the man who has 


96 


The Meek 


most of them. The joy of life lies in its 
personal relations, and these have nothing 
to do with what a man has, but only 
with what he ts. A palace is a decorated 
prison ifit benot ahome. Social éclat and 
prestige are bubbles if there be no real 
friendship. It is the simple things that 
make life sweet, and who is he who gets 
the real joy ofthem ? Not the man whose 
heart is set on ambitions or whose eye 
is dazzled by pride, but only he whose 
mind is turned outwards from himself 
to find in life what God has given. 
Love and beauty and clean labour—these 
are the heart of life, but only those who 
are not seeking great things for them- 
selves can find them. The proud and 
ambitious may have the field; the meek 
man strolling by the wayside discovers 
the treasure. 

There are, too, other things in the earth 
than these. The garden has its shady 
as well as its sunny side, and we must take 
it all together. It has its thorns as well 
as its roses. We have the bitter with the 


f 97 


The Key to the Kingdom 


sweet : life sees to that. What of disap- 
pointment, what of suffering, what of 
pain? Are we only to look on these as 
dross, which we toss aside to gather the 
jewels? Are we to enter these in that 
folio of the ledger where we write off 
the items we can never realize—our dead 
stock? If so, we have failed—tfailed be- 
cause we have not entered into our full 
estate. The problem Jesus had to solve 
was how to take the bitter, tragic, stuff 
and transmute it into the gold of an 
enriching possession—to make it a part of 
the real inheritance of life. His elixir 
for this is the spirit of meekness. ‘To see 
God’s purpose in life is to find God’s 
hand in it. To seek God’s will in it is to 
hear God’s challenge through it. To 
listen quietly for God’s voice amid the 
chilling darkness is to find a place of 
spiritual victory over it. There are many 
things we cannot understand, but none 
we cannot master, none we cannot use. 
There are many things that darken our 
sky, but none that may not help us, 


98 


The Meek 


soften us, cleanse us, refine us, and equip 
us for helping others. 


Material just meant to give thy soul its bent, 
Fix thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently im- 
pressed. 


And that is the meaning and the 
blessedness of life. It is, not what we 
make in it, but what it makes of us by the 
grace of God. The whole power to 
possess the earth lies there—in the meek- 
ness which lays us open to the secret of 
Jesus. “ All things are yours, whether 
life, or death, or things present, or things 
to come, all are yours, for ye are Christ’s 


and Christ is God’s.” 


ef 


Cais tM 





CuarTrer V 


THEY THAT HUNGER AND 
THIRST AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS 





V. They that Hunger and Thirst 
after Righteousness <= 2 


*¢ Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst 
after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” 


T is never wise to be dogmatic as 
to what was in the mind of Jesus when 
He uttered any of His great sayings, 
unless we are expressly told. His heart 
was many chambered, and had rooms in 
its compassion for every sort of troubled 
soul. But it would not be going too far 
to suggest that there were two classes 
of people of whom He was particularly 
thinking when He made this statement 
about the hunger after righteousness. 
There were, first of all, the people who 
hungered and thirsted, though not for 
righteousness. Life’ for them was one 
long series of wants and cravings, and 
to satisfy these they went out into the 
world clutching here and there in every 


103 


The Key to the Kingdom 


direction. Some filled their days with 
pleasure and were always after a new 
sensation. Some were climbing the ladder 
of ambition, some striving for knowledge. 
They were all seeking for something 
they had not got, hungering and thirsting 
for what they imagined would satisfy 
the inward unrest. In the depth of 
his being man is profoundly unhappy. 
That is what we have not always realized. 


We look before and after ; we pine for what is 
not ; 
Our serenest laughter with some pain is fraught. 


Some people are so sure that what we 
call the natural man must be happy. 
They do not realize that much appearance 
of happiness isa camouflage. ‘The trouble 
is that we are here in a world in which 
we have to find a balance, called peace, 
between our nature and the universe 
in which we live. And the balance is 
not easy to find. The way to peace 
along the purely material, or even along 


104 


They that Hunger and Thirst 


the intellectual line, is impossible, save 
at the cost of suppressing or denying 
the deeper instincts of the soul. And 
that suppression is never final. You can 
never be sure something will not happen 
to call up that deeper self which has been 
dismissed to the basement, and “ fifty 
hopes and fears,” from some hidden 
ambush, rise “‘ to rap and knock and enter 
on the soul,” and then it is good-bye 
to peace along material lines. That is 
what these people whom Christ saw all 
around Him were finding out. They were 
hungering and thirsting, but they were 
not being filled. They had no peace. They 
might protest that they were happy—a 
thing happy people never need to do. 
But they carried the signals of inward 
unrest on their very faces, as hundreds 
all round us are doing. The streets 
are full of people who show, in the strain 
upon their faces, the flag of distress, 
Jesus marked these signs. He went 
straight to His target with the right 
word for the right person, as if He had 


105 


The Key to the Kingdom 


been carrying a message for that particular 
one through all the world. It was, in 
part at least, these people of the uneasy 
peace and the restless cravings whom He 
had in mind. You are on the wrong 
track, He seemed to say. You are hunger- 
ing and thirsting for things that will 
never satisfy you. You must change the 
direction of your desires. You must aim 
higher. “ Blessed are they that hunger 
and thirst after righteousness, for they 
shall be filled.” 

But there are another class of people 
whom He had in mind: those who were 
secking peace in righteousness. They 
were trying to find a righteousness which 
they could easily satisfy, in which they 
would cease to hunger and thirst. They 
were trying to fulfil the claim of righteous- 
ness by an artificial standard of conduct, 
in which they would get rid of the reproach 
of conscience and the torment of the 
ideal. : 

Every man who is born into this world 
becomes conscious sooner or later of a 


106 


They that Hunger and Thirst 


claim which is made on him—the claim 
of duty or of right. Daniel Webster, 
the great American statesman, was once 
asked, “‘ What is the greatest thought 
that has ever entered your mind ?” 
He paused for a moment, and then he 
replied, “The thought of my personal 
accountability to God.” ‘The voice of 
duty may vary its tone according to the 
sensitiveness of conscience, or the cir- 
cumstances in which we have been born 
and trained. But in some form or another 
the claim of conscience makes itself heard. 
The great word “ought” throws its 
shadow over our life as real as a hand 
laid on our shoulders. We may argue 
about it as we like, there are things which 
when we are quite sincere, we know in 
our hearts we ought to do and to be, and 
things we ought not. Every race or 
tribe, however primitive, has its own 
moral code. ‘The reason why we ought 
to do certain things we may not know; 
the more deeply we ponder, the more 
clearly we shall realize that this compul- 


107 


The Key to the Kingdom 


sion on the spirit comes.from nothing less 
than the heart of God Himself and from 
our real relationship to Him. But 
however the claim may come, it is there, 
and there is no peace till we satisfy it. 
There are vatious ways, however, of 
satisfying it. Some people put this claim 
of righteousness into certain definite 
moral precepts which they strive to obey. 
When they have obeyed these, more or 
less, they persuade themselves that they 
have squared the debt and can face the 
world like men who have paid their 
creditors twenty shillings in the pound. 
That was how the Pharisees tried to deal 
with this claim of righteousness. ‘They 
set out the claim in the various precepts 
of the Law, and by obeying these, tried 
to work off the haunting sense of debt. 
‘That was the secret of their devotion to 
the Law. They wanted an escape from 
conscience, the ruthless pursuer—a refuge 
from the “ majestic instancy” of his 
* following feet.” The Pharisees wanted 
to get rid of this insatiable torment of ~ 


108 


They that Hunger and Thirst 


the ideal, this constant shadow of imper- 
fection which made them ashamed of 
themselves and broke their pride and 
self-complacency. Saul, the one-time 
Pharisee’s ruthless persecution of the 


Christians arose from that. He hunted > 


them because God was pursuing him. And 
lots of people who do not think they are 
Pharisees, are trying to do the same thing 
to-day. You will hear a man say, “I 
pay my debts, I live a clean life, I try 
to help other people.” That is a very 
popular kind of statement to make, and 
it invariably raises a cheer for an honest 
man. But that is the spirit of Pharisaism 
none the less, though it come from a man 
who has nothing to do with religion and 
never enters a church door. The same 
thing appears in the idea—popular in 
some quarters—that if people will attend 
early Communion, or morning service, 
they can do with the rest of Sunday what 
they like. They are really trying to 
square the inward creditor, called Con- 
science, by a composition which they can 


109 


The Key to the Kingdom 


pay. And that is the essence of Phari- 
saism. It is the spirit of the man who 
owns that God has His rights in his life, 
but who tries to settle with Him by 
setting up an artificial standard of con- 
duct which he can more or less reach. 
And you find, when you get to the root 
of it, that the whole effort is made in 
order to be quit of this hunger and thirst 
after righteousness. It is to quiet their 
conscience, which, with all their ritual 
of decent habits or religious observance, 
can never quite be stilled and never quite 
leaves them in peace. It was these 
people Jesus had in mind. Do not 
imagine, He said, that you are going to 
find peace by getting rid of this hunger 
and thirst after righteousness on easy 
terms, or indeed on any terms at all. If 
you only knew it, your blessedness con- 
sists in just this very hunger and thirst. 
Your satisfaction is just in this craving 
which cannot be satisfied. Your real 
joy does not lie along some easy way 
of getting even with duty, or with God: 


IIo 


They that Hunger and Thirst 


it lies in welcoming this inward strife for 
righteousness and seeking an even deeper 
insight into its meaning. “ Blessed are 
they that hunger and thirst after 
righteousness, for they shall be filled.” 
Now, how do we explain this apparent 
contradiction ? For it is a contradiction, 
and the more we realize what Christ 
meant by righteousness the more the 
contradiction stares us in the face. What 
was righteousness for Jesus? It was no 
batch of cut-and-dried precepts, no con- 
ventional code of morals, no clear system 
of regulations. There are no rules in 
the New Testament except the rules 
which spring out of love, and these are 
rules a man makes for himself. You 
cannot put Christ’s righteousness into a 
code-book, or into ten commandments, 
or twenty; still less was righteousness 
for Jesus a conventional standard of re- 
spectable habits. ‘The respectable people 
indeed looked on Him as a kind of 
anarchist. His righteousness is of the 
Spirit. If you want to put it into a 


III 


The Key to the Kingdom 


precept, the nearest approach to it is, 
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
all thy heart and soul and strength and 
mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.” 
And what does that mean? It means 
that righteousness is a way of life and 
service springing from our own right 
relation to God ; and that God, One who 
is Father with no demand on us but 
that of love. Who can say, except very 
imperfectly, what would be the complete 
way of life in this world of a man who is. 
living fully and wholly as the child of 
God the Father? And who can say, 
except very imperfectly, into what chan- 
nels the great river of love to men would 
pour itself when once the fountain had 
been set flowing in our souls? There 
are, it is true, certain conventional things 
which the Christian conscience has laid 
it down should be done by people who 
love their neighbours as God’s children. 
But it is only too possible to be conven- 
tionally affectionate yet loveless at heart. 
It is only too painfully common for people 
112 


They that Hunger and Thirst 


to live a correct and faultless Christian 
life and to miss the whole spirit of Chris- 
tianity. There are people who will do 
a kind action in such a way as to make it 
an insult. They will give bread to the 
hungry and, in their lovelessness, turn 
it into a stone. While there are others 
who defy convention, or have not learned 
it, yet their spirit ringstrue. Their words 
are poor and crude, yet the spirit of love, 
like the imprisoned flame within the uncut 
diamond, flashes through every awkward 
movement and every broken sentence. 
We cannot put that spirit into formulas 
of correct behaviour. Its demands are 
measureless. It means a new order of 
life in which we have to live every hour 
of our day, in every throb of our being. 
That is what Jesus means by righteouse 
ness. And the craving to fulfil the spirit 
_ of love in everything is the hunger and 
thirst which is blessed. 

Tt is the same when we come to ask 
what love to God and to our neighbour 
means in corporate life. What will cor- 


8 113 


The Key to the Kingdom 


porate righteousness mean? Are we to 
be content with paying our debt or 
keeping the present rules of the social 
and industrialorder ? Or, for that matter 
of it, is there any new order which will 
finally and fully satisfy us? Some people 
tell us that the love of our neighbour 
demands a certain structure of society, 
which they are able to set down, with all 
its details, on paper. They insist that. 
we have only to order our business and 
industry by certain rules and make in- 
dustry keep to them, and the millennium 
will have come. And it is true that 
righteousness demands its changes. But 
no mechanical arrangements will satisfy 
it. The ideal City of God is always 
beyond us. The demands of a love- 
quickened conscience are always ahead. 
And however true to the suggestions of 
the spirit of righteousness our rules or 
arrangements for living together may be, 
the real righteousness is of the spirit. 
It may be just as true of our social recon- 
struction as it was of the legalism of the 


II4 


They that Hunger and Thirst 


Jews—that we have the form and lack 
the reality. Our behaviour to others may 
be scrupulously right and yet our atti- 
tude grievously wrong. We need to 
keep our hearts ceaselessly open and our 
consciences always alive. That is what 
the hunger for righteousness demands. 
We may smile at Blake’s words about 
building Jerusalem in England’s green 
and pleasant land, at the heroics of the 
sword which is never going to sleep, or 
the mind which is never to have peace. 
But that is what is in store for us if we 
are out for the righteousness of Christ all 
through. It is like climbing a mountain : 
the higher we reach, we seem to find our- 
selves in an air which is more and more 
difficult to breathe, with a summit which 
seems to move farther and farther off, as 
if to mock us. 

How then can Christ say that those 
who hunger and thirst after righteousness 
are blessed, and blessed because they shall 
be satisfied ? 

The key to the riddle is not so far to 


115 


The Key to the Kingdom 


seek. It is just this, that he who seeks 
_ for a righteousness which is the infinite 
demand of love upon his love-kindled | 
heart and refuses to be content with a 
limited standard, finds himself in a 
relation to God which brings its own 
satisfaction. He abides in the love of 
God. He is breathing the air ofa 
spiritual country which is his home. 
Duty for him springs out of love, like 
water from the fountain. That is the 
secret of the blessedness of those that 
hunger and thirst after righteousness. 
Their hunger springs out of love. ‘Their 
thirst rises out of their fellowship with 
God. It is the joyful exercise of a nature 
which has found its real life—its true 
destiny. Look for instance, at the prodi- 
gal and put yourself in that home where 
he had discovered his father. His was 
the hunger and thirst after righteousness. 
** Make me as one of thy hired servants. 
I will work my fingers to the bone for 
you. There is nothing I will not be glad 
to do. Lay what demands on me you 


116 


They that Hunger and Thirst 


like, you will never wear out my spirit.” 
And why? Not to satisfy his father and 
feel that he has paid his debt; for all 
thought of debt had vanished in a love 
he could never fully express. It was 
another world he was living in—a world 
whose name was home, where there was 
no debt but that which springs from love. 
So he longed to live out to the full this 
new sonship, his longing all the time un- 
satisfied, yet all the time filled with a joy 
and a peace which was inexpressible, be- 
cause his heart was right towards his 
fatber and his sonship was real without 
cloud or shadow. ‘That picture lets us 
into the secret. When forgiving love 
has won our hearts, righteousness, which 
is the way of love in everything, becomes 
the passionate adventure and untiring 
quest of our souls, 

There is a modern story of a prodigal 
who came back too late. He had gone 
by the accustomed route into the far 
country and found himself in America. 
_ Then came the hunger which loneliness 


117 


The Key to the Kingdom 


and need are designed to awaken and he 
wrote a letter. The reply came back 
which opened the way home, and the 
next step would have been to take it. 
He resolved to wait till he had “ made 
good,” which was all in the way of right- 
eousness. But he was not content with 
a moderate restoration to security and 
character. He wanted to reach a position 
where he could return in a kind of triumph 
without losing an atom of pride. So he 
waited longer. He made a name for 
himself, and then he planned his journey. 
But he had delayed a year too long. His 
father died before he reached home, 
and when at last he came, there was noth- 
ing for him except the cold ashes of 
remorse. What was the real trouble? 
It was surely this: he wanted to be right 
with his father, but not on terms of a 
loving forgiveness which demanded noth- 
ing but penitence. He wanted to be 
right with the old man on the terms of a 
self-righteousness which would not require 
to be forgiven. And for that he strove 


118 


They that Hunger and Thirst 


—that fixed standard of his own good 
deeds. But all the time he was denying 
himself and his father the fellowship in 
which he would have found the true 
righteousness that alone would have satis- 
fied his heart. He was putting into the 
castle of pride the effort he should have 
put into the building of fellowship. Had 
he been content to come home and take 
in humility the love that offered itself 
to him, he need not have ceased his 
effort to make good. But the difference 
would have been this: the effort to win 
peace would have been transmuted into 
an effort to live out a fellowship which 
would have been already his by the mere 
act of taking it. 

There is a word of warning here to 
those who would seek some lower road 
to peace than the highest, and are content 
with some conventional stereotyped stan- 
dard which is pitched according to the 
estimate we make of our own ability. 
That way lies stagnation, and boredom, 
and ultimately death. Are we tempted, 


119 


The Key to the Kingdom 


for instance, to yield to the common cry 
that Christianity is impracticable, and 
to seek for something less? There is 
only one result of that: it ceases to have 
any more interest for us except as a 
pastime. The Christianity which is not 
always pioneering in the sphere — of the 
impossible, will soon be rejected as mere 
lumber, unless to all but leisured minds. 
Where Christ ceases to be a challenge to 
our conscience in every direction, He will 
soon cease to be any kind of comfort to 
our hearts. The heart of a man has no 
use for a religion which cam be domesti- 
cated like a tame cat, or a God who can 
be reduced to the level of an indulgent 
parent. We are living spiritually on a 
kind of slope, in which there is no alter- 
native between the fight to move up- 
wards and the slackness that drifts down- 
wards. God quicken us into the hunger 
and thirst after righteousness! It is the 
only assurance we can have that we are 
alive. ‘The only security we can have for 
our salvation is in a love which will give 


120 


They that Hunger and Thirst 


us no rest from the struggle to be true 
to it. 

The nature of a Christian man, as the 
Bible has often suggested, is like the heart 
of a sailor who is out on the high seas. 
His nature is to venture forth, not to 
cruise about some sheltered harbour, or 
drift timidly from point to point along 
the shore. The winds may blow, and 
there are storms to meet, and he is always 
voyaging on and never seeming to get 
nearer home. Day after day he scans 
these wide waters and those distant 
horizons that never close in, and he seems 
never to be nearing port. But with all the 
risk and storm and bafflement, there is 
deep joy in his voyaging, and satisfaction. 
For he is out where his nature longs to 
be—he is committed to the life which is 
hiselement. Soitiswith ourselves. The 
way of righteousness is difficult. The 
way of love is hard to find. We get lost 
and bewildered, and just where to find 
that thin thread of guiding, the path of 
duty, is not always easy. But there is a 


12! 


The Key to the Kingdom 


satisfaction, full and glorious, amid all 
the pain and disappointment which no 
artificial standard can bring. 


That low man seeks a little thing to do, 
Sees it and does it: 

This high man, with a great thing to pursue, 
Dies ere he knows it. 

That has the world here; should he need the 

next, 

Let the world mind him! 

This, throws himself on God, and unperplext, 
Seeking, shall find Him. 


But there is comfort here also for those 
who are dismayed by the measurelessness 
of love’s demands, and would fain make 
some compromise to arrive at peace, 
“Do not go back,” says Jesus. Thank 
God if you hunger and thirst after 
righteousness. ‘Thank God if, for you, 
there is no finality. It brings to mind a 
word of Stevenson’s “ Little do ye know 
your own blessedness; for, to travel 
hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, 
and the true success is to labour.” Christ 
put it differently. Struggling, striving 

122 


They that Hunger and Thirst 


onward, for deeper discernment of God’s 
rule in life and of the meaning of His 
righteousness in the daily round and the 
common task, you are arriving all the 
time, you ate there all the time—there, in 
the fellowship of God. You shall be 
filled here and now. Yours_is already 
the full life, the satisfying life. 

And there is even more than this, and 
more wonderful, for in His good time you 
shall find the perfect righteousness, the 
complete life. It is they who hunger 
and thirst, who bring in the new day, the 
new age. It is they who are God’s 
pioneers in a world of sin and chaos, 
breaking out new paths in the desert 
wherein the nations shall walk in the light 
of His love. That victory will come. 
When, we know not, but it will come. 
** Now it doth not yet appear what we 
shall be, but we know that when He shall 
appear, we shall be like Him.” That is 
the promise, and we shall be satisfied 
when, out of it all, we awake with His 
likeness. 


123 


oy Ny , 
a 
HENSON 





Cuapter VI 


THE MERCIFUL 





VI. The Merciful o o o 


** Blessed are the merciful : for they shall 
obtain mercy.” 


fe is not without meaning that this 
commendation of the merciful comes 
next aiter that of those who hunger and 
thirst after righteousness. One of the 
temptations of the sensitive conscience 
is the censorious spirit. ‘The heart that 
is set on righteousness is prone to be 
intolerant of moral weaklings and hard on 
those whose standard is not so high. 
When that happens to us we have merely 
escaped one peril to fall into a deeper. 
The world values a kind heart more than 
a scrupulous conscience, and in its rough 
judgment, the world is right. How 
terribly devastating that which seems 
the way of right can become when it 
loses the spirit of love, we can see in the 
-Inquisition, when the very body of 


i, 


ot yg, 





The Key to the Kingdom 


Christ was crucified afresh in an effort 
to keep it pure. What happened there, 
of course, was due to the fact that with- 
out the spirit of love we cannot even see 
the way to right. And Jesus, who knew 
the snares which the soul meets on its 
way to God, bids us remember that the 
way of right is the way of love, and the 
only right way of love, in such a weak and 
sinning world as this, is the way of mercy. 

What He means by mercy here, is often 
understood in a narrow sense. It is often 
restricted to mere humanitarianism and 
pity. The work of mercy is limited to 
kindness to those who are broken and 
beaten in the battle of life. It is Red 
Cross work, so to speak. The merciful 
man is a kind of ambulance worker, 
picking up the wounded and caring for the 
sick and the diseased. No doubt this 
comes within the scope of Christ’s great 
word. Every hospital is a home of mercy. 
Every effort to heal men’s bodies is of the 
spirit of mercy. It is worth while to 
remind ourselves that it is the spirit of 


128 


The Merciful 


Christ which has kindled the compassion 
whereby these things are done. Mercy, 
in this sense, was barely known among the 
ancients ; and where it was known it was 
regarded as a kind of extra goodness— 
not, as we see it now, the very least that 
goodness will do. And even where it 
was admired it was looked on as being 
too expensive in a world where a man’s 
chief business is to look after himself, 
If we have risen so far above the jungle 
as to care for the weak and the suffering 
instead of carrying them out into the 
forest to die, it is Christ who has led the 
way and made pity for the feeble a com- 
monplace of goodness. And only through 
the pity which Christ sustains can this 
be effectively done. You remember that 
scene in Tennyson’s poem on the Hospital. 
The great surgeon comes into the ward 
with his cynical jibe at prayer, and his 
intolerant pride of surgical dexterity in 
mending the human machine. “ Christ’s 
day is done,” he says. ‘“ Nay,” replies 
the nurse, “ it has only begun.” 
9 129 


The Key to the Kingdom 


How could I work in the wards 
If the hope of the world were a lie! 
How could I bear with the sights 
And the loathsome smells of disease, 
But that He said, “‘ Ye do it for me, 
When ye do it for these ?” 


Clever fingers may set a broken bone 
it is true, and they are needed; but we 
are learning in these days that the real 
cure of all disease depends on a finer 
touch—the touch of a love that can mend 
a broken heart and minister to a mind 
diseased. As Mr. Stephen Graham says, 
“ Philanthropical societies, parliaments, 
reform movements, and the like, are 
doomed to failure, unless they are served 
by men and women with Christ-faces.” 

This kind of blessedness needs no 
description for those who have stretched 
out strong hands of pity to their fellows. 
No one can help to heal another’s trouble 
without finding some wound in his own 
heart dry up. That is indeed the only 
real way of healing for ourselves—to pass 


130 


The Merctful 


out of self-absorption and self-pity on the 
tide of a great compassion. ‘This is the 
real direction in which we are to look for 
reward. It does not always follow that 
because you care for the weak and suffer- 
ing, others will care for you. It did not 
happen so with Christ. Who so tender 
as He, so full of mercy to the suffering, 
and who so cruelly treated in the end at 
the merciless hands of men? There are 
times when it almost seems as if the very 
people we try to help, dislike us for it. “I 
do not understand why that man should 
hate me,” said a cynic once. “I never 
did him any good.” ‘This virtue, like all 
others, must be its own reward. But 
if our hearts are turned from ourselves 
we do have our reward; for a well of 
sweetness is opened up in our own hearts 
and often in the world around us, in 
which our own dry spirits are refreshed 
and comforted. The spirit of mercy 
lights fires in other hearts, which in 
time come to warm our own. There 
is no finer possession than a tender heart 


131 


The Key to the Kingdom 


—even though it bring a crown of 
thorns. 


The song is to the singer, and comes back most 
to him; 
The gift is to the giver, and comes back most 
to him ; 
The love is to the lover, and comes back most 
to him; 
—it cannot fail. 


But this use of mercy is a narrowing 
of the word. Christ meant by mercy a 
far wider thing. He is thinking of our 
attitude to the morally, as well as the 
physically, unfit. The word outlines our 
whole policy to those who have gone 
wrong. ‘There are many classes of wrong- 
doers. There are those whose sin is 
very largely private and limited in its 
consequence to the wrongdoer himself, 
though “no man liveth to himself.” 
There are those, again, who have done 
some ill to ourselves; and some, like our 
criminals, both individuals and nations, 


132 


The Merciful 


whose sin has done damage to society, 
and brought evil on the community in 
which God has set us to live together. 
How are we to treat these people ?. What 
attitude are we to take up towards them ? 
That is avery practical question. It 
is this—our relation to the wrongdoer— 
which Christ has mostly in mind in this 
beatitude. 

What does mercy in this sense mean ? 
It means, for one thing, the kindly judg- 
ment, not of the sinful deed, but of the 
man himself by whom it has been done. 
How intolerant we are apt to be in our 
judgments of people! How sweeping 
in our condemnations! One false step; 
and a man is doomed to carry the shadow 
of reproach all his days. And our con- 
demnations are not only sweeping—they 
are apt to be artificial. The things we 
‘condemn in others are not always the 
things which Christ would condemn. 
There is no more extraordinary word of 
His than that in which He bids “ judge 
not that ye be not judged.” On the face 


133 


The Key to the Kingdom 


of it, it seems to lack something of moral 
stamina. What the world seems to need 
more than anything is a healthy hatred 
of wrong. But notice: Christ is not 
speaking of the sin; He is speaking of 
the sinner. Our danger is to import 
into our attitude towards the sinner the 
hatred we feel of his sin. Christ’s interest 
is always in the man. What is going to 
happen to him ? Howis he to be cured ? 
It is with this in mind that He calls for 
the merciful judgment. And is He not 
right ? How can we judge till we know 
the facts? And how can we know the 
full facts till we know the man himself— 
know what hidden fires of passion burn 
in his blood kindled long ago by others’ 
sin, what lurid temptations have tracked 
him down, how far the community has 
contributed to his fall? Aye, and what 
struggles he made before the ship went 
down at last. 


What’s done, we partly may compute, 
But know not what’s resisted. 


134 


The Merciful 


Are we not constantly being found out 
in wrong judgments? Here is one whom 
the world condemns as mean, but one day 
it comes out that he has been saving all 
he could to keep the family of a scape- 
grace brother. Here is another whose 
temper is not of the best, but behind the 
scenes she has a wearing struggle with 
ul-health, or is bearing a weight of 
trouble whose bitterness has sent the 
iron into her soul. And how can we 
measure even the sin, save as we see it © 
with the eyes of Jesus? ‘The conscience 
of society for evil is in point of fact, like 
a diseased eye: it is full of blind spots. 
There are sins which it sees with dazzling 
clearness, and there are sins which it does 
_ not see at all. The code of morals and 
manners, by which a man is judged to 
be a gentleman, has often little relation 
to the values of Jesus. For Him, pride 
and censoriousness and selfish greed were 
chiefest of sins, and many of the things 
which seem pardonable to the world 
stand out, in the light of Christ, black 


135 


The Key to the Kingdom 


as a mountain lake when the snow has 
fallen on the landscape. ‘The eye of love 
is the only true eye to see with, and the 
eye of love is the eye of mercy. 

But mercy means more than a kindly 
judgment of the wrongdoer. It means 
the effort to restore him to righteous- 
ness. That is always what Christ is 
interested in. How to get the sinner 
back—back to his place in our friendship, 
back to his place in society, back to his 
place in the love of God. That is the 
chief interest for Jesus, and it calls for the 
spirit of mercy and forgiveness. 

For forgiveness is just the effort to 
restore. [here is no real forgiveness of 
anyone which is not an effort to restore 
to fellowship. It is no use saying of 
any man, “I forgive, but I do not for- 
get,” meaning that while we have given 
up the effort to take vengeance upon 
him, or pay him back for his crime, there 
is still a barrier which stands and which 
we mean to keep standing. That is 
simply not forgiveness at all, for forgive- 


136 


The Merciful 


~ ness-is the passion to restore. That is 
the whole point of those great parables 
of the fifteenth of Luke. The Pharisees 
were wondering why Christ made friends 
of the publicans and sinners. For reply 
He told them three parables of lost things 
which were restored. The lost sheep was 
restored to the flock, the lost piece was 
restored to its place in the necklace, the 
lost son was restored to his place in the 
home. In every case love looks on people 
who have gone wrong as lost things who 
need to be restored. The way of mercy 
is that of the forgiving, tender spirit which 
seeks their restoration to the world and 
to God. 

Mercy’s campaign of restoration 
operates in various directions. ‘There are 
those who may have wronged ourselves. 
Mercy there means the attitude of forgive- 
ness. It is perfectly true that forgiveness 
is not complete till there is repentance, 
which just means that there is no complete 
restoration till the prodigal comes home 
ason. As a matter of fact, we can have 


137 


The Key to the Kingdom 


no fellowship with a man whose spirit 
is not in harmony with ours. There are 
things we cannot say to him, and all the 
gracious traffic of love has come to a 
stand-still. But do not let us forget that 
the thing that wrought in the Prodigal’s 
soul, and broke out at last in penitence, 
was the father’s forgiving love, which 
was there all the time, baffled, but never 
slain. Had the father taken up a stand- 
offish position and locked his door, as if 
to say, “ You will have to creep back on 
hands and knees before I will take a step 
to help you,” there would have been 
little hope of the Prodigal’s repentance. 
His hunger and solitude would never 
have touched his heart but only hardened 
it. His sense of sin would never have 
broken out in prayers and tears; it 
would have stiffened into a stubborn 
defiance. The spirit of forgiveness is 
part of the creative power of love. ‘There 
is no surer weapon in all the armoury of 
the spirit for bringing the wrongdoer to 
his knees. ‘Blessed are the merciful,” 


138 


The Merciful 


for it is they, and not earth’s ruthless 
judges, who awaken the prayer for 
mercy. 

This has its application also to society’s 
treatment of the criminal. Nothing needs 
more overhauling than our thought about 
crime and punishment. Our outlook on 
this matter is largely based on retribu- 
tionanar fear 5 not ..oni mercy. lt) 15) 
partly based on giving a man what it 
seems to us he deserves, not that which 
will make him a better man, and partly 
on the need to protect society from being 
robbed or hurt, by making the would-be 
criminal afraid. That is very roughly 
our theory of punishment, and, with all 
its appearance of being watertight, it is 
as full of holes as.a sieve. So far as 
putting an end to crime is concerned, our 
system is three-parts a failure; for a 
large number of the crimes of the country 
are committed by the same people who 
need an army of officials to watch them, 
both when they are in prison and when 
they are out of it; while statistics prove 


139 


The Key to the Kingdom 


that crime is decreased according to the 
humanity of our dealings with the 
criminal. 

But the difference between us and 
Jesus is that while we are thinking of the 
community and how to protect it from 
being robbed or hurt, Jesus is thinking 
always about the person who does the 
injury. We study how to keep our 
goods. Christ is not greatly interested 
in that. His question is how the thief 
is to be kept from stealing them, not by 
locks and bars, but by being turned into an 
honest man. That is what concerns Him. 
How are we to deal with such a man so 
that he may be restored to citizenship 
and honesty ? That is the problem He 
sets us. His point of view is hard to 
reach, but it is clear. He was not 
afraid of being hurt or robbed; His 
whole interest was to save the man who 
might intend to do it, or had done it. 
‘J was in prison and ye visited me.” 
That shows how His mind was running. 


That is the picture that holds His mind 
140 


The Merciful 


as He looks round on His world. That 
is His thought of the true goal of 
mercy. 

But what about justice ? we ask. What 
of the consequences which follow sin, and 
must follow sin? No one can ever 
escape the consequences of sin, whether 
society deals with them or not, for the 
worst consequences of sin are in the soul 
of the sinner. As for what we call our 
justice, with its graduated scales of 
punishments, it may help a man to see 
his sin, or give him time to repent, or take 
him out of a bad environment, but do 
not let us call it justice. Shakespeare’s 
way of putting it is worth thinking about : 
“Consider this, that in the course of 
justice, none of us should see salvation.” 
Where would we stand if our rough-and- 
ready methods of punishment were to 
be applied with the standards of Jesus ? 
What is justice ? Justice is giving a man 
his due. And what is a man’s due? 
It is just what he needs for a complete 
life as a child of God, what he needs for 


I4I 


The Key to the Kingdom 


the redemption of his manhood. That 
is his due. Whatever is needed to reach 
him, to change him, to help him to be a 
better man, that is justice; and our 
penal codes and methods of punishment 
will never be anything but a makeshift 
till they are modified by this outlook of 
Jesus. In His love, justice and mercy 
meet, for they are one; and mercy is 
blessed, “‘ both to him that gives and him 
that takes.” 

Mercy has its application to nations 
as well, and we are coming toseeit. Here 
it means the effort to restore international 
fellowship. ‘That was the real point of 
Christ’s word about loving our enemies. 
His purpose was, not only that we should 
not become like them, infected by their 
spirit of enmity, but that they should be 
turned into friends. It is fellowship, 
not mere security, which must be our 
aim in international life; and indeed 
only in the way of fellowship can real 
security be obtained, as we are beginning 
to see. 


142 


The Merc:ful 


And now—only now—are we in a 
position to understand what Christ means 
by the last clause of His beatitude— 
“for they shall obtain mercy.” It is 
no mere tit-for-tat. It is not simply 
repayment by God for what we have 
earned by our mercy. His forgiveness 
is not won through any merit of ours. 
What then does Christ mean—what, 
too, does He mean by that other injunc- 
tion which He teaches us to put into a 
prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses, as 
we forgive them that trespass against 
us’ ? His meaning becomes clear when 
we see forgiveness as restoration to His 
fellowship. How can we be restored 
to His fellowship except as we have His 
Spirit and are ready, at least, to live in 
the Divine order, which is the order of 
love ? And how can that spirit of love 
be a reality, except as we show it in all 
our conduct to our fellows, and especially 
to those who have gone wrong? ‘The 
mercy by which God forgives us is not a 
mere legal arrangement : it is a gracious, 


143 


The Key to the Kingdom 


seeking love which receivet those who 
come. The one condition is that we 
turn from the hard and loveless way, 
and step into the new world in which 
love reigns supreme in everything. So 
it is the merciful alone who can receive 
mercy. It is not that God refuses to 
forgive the unmerciful spirit. It is a 
matter of literal fact that He cannot. For 
the man who has not the spirit of love 
has not really returned to the Father’s 
house. He is still dwelling amid the 
husks of his own self-righteousness. 

The experience which brings us within 
the glory of the Divine mercy may come 
in two ways. It may come through the 
very effort to overcome some bitterness 
of our own and to cherish the forgiving 
spirit. That is not easy, it lays a real 
cross upon the heart. And the very 
difficulty we have in forgiving, its cost 
to us, may give us some dim vision of what 
it meant for Christ upon His Cross to 
pray for mercy on His foes, and so bring 
before our wondering eyes some hint of 


Tt 


The Merciful 


the miracle of the mercy of God. Or it 
may come from the other side, and our 
vision of God in Christ, suffering, for- 
giving, may strike into our souls such a 
sense of our own unworthiness and 
awaken such gratitude, that our neigh- 
bour’s wrong to us becomes a very light 
and little thing to overcome. In any 
case, we have not found our place in 
God’s mercy till mercy becomes the very 
habit of our life. We have not found our 
place in the great family of God till we 
are cherishing the Father’s spirit. It is 
not a matter of bargain or reward. It 
is a matter of living in a new world— 
Christ’s world—in which hatred of sin 
becomes pity for the sinner, and our 
bitter grudge and anger turn to a great 
compassion for one who has become the 
- slave of evil. Blessed is he who thus 
loses his enmity in a great experience of 
God’s compassion. Are we standing with 
any harsh or censorious spirit before the 
thought of one who has done us ill? 
That is our opportunity. For we are 


fo) 145 


The Key to the Kingdom 


standing there before a door at which, 
if we knock and seek for grace, it will 
open out on the blessed country of the 


fellowship of God the Father. 





Cuapter VII 


THE PURE IN HEART 





VII. The Pure in Heart o o 


“ Blessed are the pure in heart : for they shall 
see God.” 


HIS beatitude is like a delicate 

flower. One has the feeling that 
to peer too closely into its depths is to 
destroy its beauty. Yet we must dis- 
cover what it means to be pure in heart, 
and what it means to see God, before we 
can get into the secret, for both of these 
are popularly misunderstood. 

It is an amazing promise—“ they shall 
see God.” It was the very last thing 
that many of the hearers of Jesus expected 
—or desired. There was an old saying 
which had made a deep impression on 
their minds that the vision of God is 
something too awesome for human eyes. 
“No man can see God and live.” The 
very name of God for their forefathers 
was too sacred for them to take upon 


149 


The Key to the Kingdom 


their lips in common speech. But Jesus 
tells them quite simply and frankly that 
if only they are pure in heart they should 
see God; and that not only would they 
not die, but He went so far as to say in 
His whole teaching that without this 
vision of God no man can really live. 
What does He mean by seeing God ? 
Where are we to look for God? Is this 
vision of God an experience which can 
happen to ordinary people living an 
ordinary life? All these questions flash 
into the mind. One thing is certain, 
it was a matter of daily experience with 
Jesus. He saw God day by day, and 
lived in a world that was alive with His 
presence. He did not need to go out of 
the busy world to find God. We are 
apt to imagine that when He left His 
disciples and the crowd for the solitude 
of the hillside, He was going apart to 
listen for a voice and feel the touch of a 
presence which He could not know in the 
ordinary world of care and duty. That 
is a wrong view to take. He went apart 
150 


The Pure in Heart 


to speak with God in prayer—in direct 
communion; and to refresh the jaded 
spirit that was wearied with the burden 
of the world. The ship’s compass needs 
to be taken into a quiet place where it 
may be reset and recover its capacity to 
be responsive to the touch of the mag- 
netic currents. But it is in the ocean, 
amid the daily buffeting of winds and 
storms, that it is to find the contact with 
these currents which will make it an 
instrument of guiding. So it was with 
Jesus. He was in daily touch with God. 
Life was a parable in which He read God’s 
message. The needs of the world were 
a challenge in which He heard God’s 
voice. Nature was a mirror in which He 
saw the reflection of the Father’s love. 
The very rain and sunshine falling on the 
good and on the evil brought to His soul 
the sense of the unfailing love. And 
the deeper experiences—the bitter ex- 
periences—were marked with a shining 
pathway of duty in which He discerned 
the Will of God. The whole of life was 


151 


The Key to the Kingdom 


sacramental of God’s love. Its vital 
meaning was discovered through His 
contact with God in it. He saw God in 
everything ; that was the secret of life 
for Jesus. Even when the Cross lifted 
up its dark shadow and engulfed His 
spirit in its black depths, He was heard to 
cry “ Father”; for even there He found 
God and knew His fellowship. He saw 
God—because He was pure in heart. 
Now, it is in this sense He means us to 
see God. ‘The people of the Bible had 
a way of describing the nearness of God 
which we have lost. They spoke of the 
company of angels. Their world, as 
it seemed, was lit with the glint of these 
angel wings. It was their way of describ- 
_ ing the nearness of God. And we have 
* lost it, for we can no longer think in their 
terms. But our danger is, that in losing 
the angels, or ceasing to look for them, 
we should lose the thing for which the 
angels stood—the presence of God in 
daily life. The great business to which 
Jesus calls us, is to recover this spiritual 


152 


The Pure in Heart 


experience—the sense of God in daily 
life. ‘Till that happens the world we live 
in is a poor place. It is a dismal change 
to have lost the angels from the skies if in 
their place we do not find God every- 
where. It is lost ground to deny the 
reality of sacred things and sacred places 
if we do not go on to find all life sacred. 
This is what Jesus calls us to do. He 
calls us from the worship of a God 
beyond us, and only breaking into life 
now and then by special visitations, 
into a reverence that finds God every- 
where. ‘“ Behold I stand at the door and 
knock,” He says. That is His message 
about every experience. As we stand 
in the world of nature and some scene 
of beauty fills our eyes with its loveliness 
and throws a sense of awe upon our 
spirits, He is saying to us, “ Behold, I 
stand at the door and knock.” ‘The 
touch of beauty upon our spirits is the | 
touch of His hand upon the lintel of our 
hearts. It is the very same with the 
needs of others. As we look at the world 


153 


The Key to the Kingdom 


of suffering and the appeal of its pitiful- 
ness strikes into our hearts, He is saying 
to us, “ Behold, I stand at the door and 
knock.” When He calls us to enter 
someone’s sad world with our help, He 
is calling us to let Him into our own. 
And have we never in other experiences 
felt the same thing—in the strange appeal, 
for instance, that some beautiful life has 
made to us, or in the wonder of some 
human love, say a man’s for his sick 
wife, or a woman’s for her helpless 
child; or, maybe, a child’s trust and 
innocence sending into our soul a sense 
of our defects and bringing the grey 
shadows up out of the past. William 
Canton, in his book about his little girl, 
describes the feeling that shot through 
him when suddenly at night she opened 
her eyes and looked at him. 


Heavens! How these steadfast eyes 
Their eerie vigil kept. 
Was it some angel in disguise 


Who searched us while we slept ? 
154 


The Pure in Heart 


Who winnowed every sin, 
Who tracked each slip and fall— 
One of God’s spies, not babbykin, 
Not babbykin at all. 


Is there father, or mother, or anyone who 
has ever looked into the heart of a child, 
who has not felt it? And is there any 
better way to comprehend the advent of a 
child into a home than to hear in it again 
this whisper of the God Who would come 
in? 

It is the very same with life’s darker . 
experiences. What is a great sorrow 
breaking into our peace but just an 
opportunity for God ? Does not sorrow 
open windows? It is in our sufferings 
that we see. A big grief upsets our 
values. New and precious things begin 
to shine. And love, made strong through 
sorrow, wells up in our life. We did not 
realize till the friends were gone how we 
loved them, and what a great place they 
had in our hearts. But now we know. 
- And what is that love which so wells up 


155 


The Key to the Kingdom 


in us? Is it not the love of God—the 
very fountain of all human affection, 
making itself known to us as our greatest 
gift? ‘That is sorrow’s real compensa- 
_ tion, and God is in it—the guarantee 
of love’s permanence, so that even 
when the angel of pain or grief throws 
his shadow over our life, again it is, as 
Watts shows in his picture, “ Love and 
Death,” the Divine upon the doorstep of 
our world. For as he shows us, even 
Death with his face of gloom carries 
behind him a light which is Divine. 
And when he has passed in we can 
see it,—though we may not see it till 
then. 

And most of all, do we not see God in 
Jesus? That is what we mean by calling 
Him the Son of God. It is nothing less 
than this, that when we look at Him or 
think of Him, or hear some challenge 
of His echoing through our life, it is God 
saying to us, “ Behold, I stand at the 
door and knock.” ‘There is no situation 
where we may not find Him. ‘There is no 


156 


The Pure in Heart 


circumstance but we can meet Him in it. 
There is no joy in life which does not 
come with the mark of His love upon it ; 
so that we can feel that it comes, as it 
were, direct from Him. ‘There is no 
experience of life, however common- 
place it be, which cannot be divinely lit 
and thereby flash into meaning, as the 
dark hillside flames into loveliness when 
the sunlight’s on the heather. And it 
is in the commonplace we are to look for 


Him: 


Not where the wheeling systems darken, 
Or our benumbed conceiving soars ; 
The drift of pinions, would we hearken, 

Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors. 


For the whole earth is full of His glory. 
“Whither shall I go from Thy presence, 
or whither shall I flee from Thy spirit ? 
If I make my bed in hell, Thou art there.” 
That is, in point of fact, what gives us 
hope in the hell we make for ourselves 
through our shame and failure and 


157 


The Key to the Kingdom 


lovelessness, that God is in it; and in the 
very remorse and guiltiness there is the 
whisper of His voice trembling through 
the shadows, “‘ Behold, I stand at the 
‘door: and knock.” For even in the 
misery that visits the sinful life there is a 
love that will not let us off, because He 
will not let us go. 

The fact is, that till we see God, there 
is no real and intelligible meaning in 
life. One thing is to be said about the 
theory of the love of God—even if it be 
only a theory—it is the only credible and 
intelligible explanation of the world. 
But it only becomes convincing when we 
teally find that love working through 
everything. Life for many people is a 
thing which is good only in shreds and 
patches: and for many others a thing of 
sound and fury, signifying nothing. But 
when you see God in it, and find Him 
there, the world becomes the Father’s 
House. It is heaven begun: we have 
entered, even here on earth, the spiritual 
country. 


158 


The Pure in Heart 


But how to see God in life—that is the 
point. That is the great secret. It 
needs the interpreting mind, as every- 
thing does. Language itself would be 
nothing without the interpreting mind. 
You need the key to everything. We 
make our own world by the heart we 
carry through it. | A man with a guilty 
conscience finds the light of a stern 
judgment in the dawn that guides a 
happy traveller upon his way. You have 
got to be in the right attitude, says 
Jesus, if you are going to see God. It is 
like looking at a stained glass window. 
If you would see its beauty and read its 
message you have to be within. Out- 
side it is only a dark blur. But stand 
within, where the light falls through it, 
and the dull glass blazes into a message 
and a picture. So it is with God. Find 
the right standpoint. See life with His 
light shining through it. For every bit 
of its texture has some imprisoned mes- 
sage which His light can set free, if only 
you have the eyes to see it. And this 


159 


The Key to the Kingdom 


is the right spirit, the true attitude—to 
be pure in heart. 

Now, what does Jesus mean by being 
pure in heart? We often misconstrue 
it. We think of a heart clean of all base 
or impure desires. But it is more than 
that. It means a heart that is simple 
and sincere. Purity of heart is single- 
mindedness of purpose in seeking the 
truth and the will of God. It is, in a 
word, sincerity, which means being open 
to the light. ‘That is the mark of a really 
Christian spirit. It is a strong thing to 
say, but sincerity was the one thing which 
of all others Christ demanded. He was - 
always testing people for sincerity, for 
purity of motive. When a man came to 
Him gushing about his desire to follow 
Him, Jesus flung to him a question, a 
rebuff, which we can only understand as a 
test of sincerity. Did the man want to 
follow Him for what He was, or for some- 
thing else? Did he want the truth, the 
light, at all costs? Was he utterly open 
to what Christ would teach him and 


160 


The Pure in Heart 


command him? The scribes and Phari- 
sees failed just here. They were not 
sincere. ‘This does not mean that they 
were not good men, seeking righteous- 
hess in their own way. We cannot help 
being sorry for them sometimes. But the 
flaw that ran through them, like a crack 
through the crystal, was that they were 
not sincere. They were not open to the 
light from whatever quarter it came. 
They wanted it through their own 
windows. ‘They were not sincerely seek- 
ing to be right at all costs, whatever the . 
right might mean. They were seeking 
to be right along the lines they were - 
familiar with, and no other. They 
wanted only so much truth as would not 
conflict with their views. And so when 
Jesus came, bringing a message of God 
and a spirit aflame with His love, they 
failed to see God in Him. ‘They would 
not admit His truth into their hearts. 
They would not believe they could be 
mistaken. If only they had had the 
open eye, ready to welcome truth and 


bbe 161 


The Key to the Kingdom 


love, they would have seen them even in 
a peasant from Nazareth. They would 
have welcomed them even though they 
broke their religious system into bits. 
But they were not sincere. Their hearts 
were not clean of self-centred desires ; 
so they missed God. ‘That was why the 
publicans and the harlots were hailed 
by’ Christ as likely to go into the King- 
dom of Heaven before the self-righteous 
good. Many of the former were sincere ; 
they were open to the light. They 
looked at Jesus with eyes that had no 
prejudice, and minds without veil of 
caste or custom. ‘They were not blinded _ 
by their own self-righteousness or shut 
up to a theory of how God would come 
or how He would reveal Himself. Their 
hearts, stained though they were with 
evil, were open to love and friendship 
and the beauty of holiness wherever they 
found it, and for them Jesus shone. This 
is a strange thing, but it is a fact that can 
be paralleled in modern life. There are 
people to-day whose lives may not be 


162 


The Pure in Heart 


very reputable, but for whom Jesus 
shines in a way in which He does not shine 
for others whose eyes are blinded by 
theories about Him. It is a tragic fact 
that many a real reform inspired by 
human pity has found support among 
those who stood aloof from religion, 
while not a few within the churches have 
proved its most bitter opponents. Re- 
ligion has again and again been delivered 
from its corruptions by the humane 
instincts of those who were without. 
Sins like pride and self-righteousness may 
have a more deadly effect upon the soul 
than the grosser vices of the body. 
Father Dolling remarks on this from his 
experiences in the Portsmouth slums. 
“Our falls in Portsmouth,” he says, 
“entailed no complete destruction of 
character, hardly any disfigurement at 
all. Boys stole because it was, the easiest 
way of making a livelihood. Girls sinned 
because their mothers had sinned before 
them, unconscious of any shame in it. 
The soul unquickened, the body alone is 
| 163 


The Key to the Kingdom 


depraved and therefore the highest part 
is still capable of the most beautiful 
development.” Does not that throw 
some light on the value of sincerity? 
Many of these people were open to the 
light because they had no shelters of 
respectability, nothing to make them feel 
they were as good as they could be made, 
nothing to make them imagine they had 
found out the whole truth. ‘They were 
* open to life, to all it might bring them, 
and therefore they were open to God. 
There are many kinds of insincerity. 
There is the insincerity which comes of 
prejudice. A man is prejudiced against 
the truth and the light of God, because 
of something he has heard or seen or 
imagined. He refuses to let any light 
which would make him widen his view 
get past these blinkers. He is not sincere. 
Another man may be _ prejudiced 
against the light of God because of his 
view of the universe. He starts out with 
some theory about its being a bad world, 
or a muddled world, or with some grudge 


164 


The Pure in Heart 


against God. When sorrow comes it 
makes hint bitter or hard. He cannot 
find God in it because he does not believe 
God can be found there. He _ goes 
through life unconsciously looking for 
things which will confirm his theory, and 
he finds them. If we think the world is 
a bad world, a world without God, we will 
find plenty of arguments to confirm it in 
our mind. The very light will become 
darkness. For the world reflects the 
mood with which we face it. The 
grumbler finds plenty of food for grumbl- 
ing. It is a strange thing, but life is the 
kind of experience that blinds our eyes to 
God if we will not open them wide enough 
to see Him. The world will harden the 
heart which will not permit it to soften 
It. 

Some are prejudiced against seeing God 
by their ideal of life. To see God would 
shatter so many of their cherished dreams. 
It would work so many changes in their 
outlook. ‘To see God in the need of the 
world would give them what someone 


165 


The Key to the Kingdom 


calls a “pain in the mind.” To find 
God in some brother at their side would 
mean smashing up a good many of their 
social values. To hear God calling them 
to a lowly way or to a hard duty would 
mean pulling down their idols of success | 
and changing the current of their 
ambition. To follow Jesus in His love 
for men as men, would open up many 
strange friendships. It would alter their 
whole world, and this they will not have ; 
so they shut their eyes against the vision 
of God. They are not sincere. Their 
motives are all for self. They are not 
out for the highest, for the life that Jesus 
has made to shine. And their world 
remains what it is—a place unlit by God; 
their failures, no beautiful valleys where 
life becomes rich with new meanings ; 
their sorrows untouched by any radiance 
of Divine companionship. They do not 
want God’s way for them and life has 
no Divine footprints, They do not 
want the Christ-like spirit and life has 
no power to shape them to His likeness. 


166 


The Pure in Heart 


But the pure in heart, the sincere, the 
people who are open to life at every point 
and who meet it with the faith that God 
is in it and are seeking for nothing except 
to find Him there, whatever His voice 
may say or wherever His hand may 
beckon—the pure in heart are blessed, 
for they see God. 

How do we reach this sincerity, this 
purity of heart ? It may come in various 
ways. It may come through disillusion- 
ment and failure. God has various ways 
of showing us how poor and shoddy are 
our own ideals; how tawdry is the gilt 
of earth’s sham successes; how mean 
are the motives that have self at the heart 
of them. Some bitter experience may 
bring it, and in brokenness and weariness 
we may be content to look up and see 
God’s love break in. They tell us that 
the man who is refining silver carries on 
the process till the metal in his crucible is 
so pure that its surface is a mirror in 
which he can see the reflection of his face, 


May it not be that God works like that, 
167 


~ 


The Key to the Kingdom 


refining us by life’s disillusionments and 
disappointments till we are pure enough 
to take on our hearts the reflection of 
His face as He meets us in life. 

But the pure heart is found where God 
Himself is found, in the presence of 
Jesus. He is the light—and light both 
quickens the eyes to see and illumines 
what we look at. That is what Christ 
came to do for us and for our world—to 
open our eyes and to light up our world. 
We see God in Him and in life, by a 
lamp of need and faith which Christ 
kindles in our hearts. “He that fol- 
loweth Me shall not walk in darkness, 
but shall have the light of life.” 


168 


Cuapter VIII 


THE PEACEMAKERS 





VIII. The Peacemakers o o 


“ Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall 
be called the children of God.” 


HERE are two main tasks to which 
the people of the Kingdom are 
called in these beatitudes. The one is 
the showing of mercy; this is the task 


of redemption. The other is the making BS 


of peace; this is the creation of fellow- 
ship. The world in which Jesus lived 
had many features in it very like our own. 
It was seething with strife of nearly 
every kind—strife between the nations, 
strife between the classes, strife between 
the religious parties. It had its full 
measure also of the conflicts that arise 
between individuals, in homes, in families, 
and in business life. The cauldron of 
hatred was always threatening to boil 
over. How men and women, with the 
-animosities of centuries and agelong pre- 


I7I 


The Key to the Kingdom 


judices of training deep in their blood, 
could be helped into a way of living 
together in a real fellowship—that was 
- His problem. And that is also ours. 
Perhaps there is no word in all Christ’s 
message that has been taken less seriously 
than this. There has never been any 
doubt in the minds of people that peace 
among men is one of the fruits of the 
Spirit of Christ. We have paid lip 
service to this ideal more than to any 
other. Yet there has been very little 
success in its pursuit. Is it because we 
have never fully believed in the possi- 
bility of attaining it? How else, for 
instance, can we account for the strange 
fact that with the Gospels open before 
us, there should be people for whom world 
peace is a mere dream? A curious 
scepticism on the subject infects them like 
a plague. Its roots are difficult to trace, 
but one of them is the idea that the 
instinct of pugnacity is part of human 
nature, and that therefore we must make 
up our minds to treat war like a recurrent 


172 


The Peacemakers 


disease which can never be stamped out. 
“You cannot change human nature,” 
say they. They do not realize that to 
accept their shallow philosophy one must 
abandon the whole Christian position 
about man and his redemption. No! 
There are two main reasons why strife 
exists to-day as it always has done in the 
past. 

One is that we have never made peace- 
making our serious task. We have never 
really given our minds to it. When 
friction has arisen, our idea has generally 
been to patch things up and make some 
kind of settlement. We have been con- 
tent with enough to get the machinery 
started and to keep life going—as men 
on a journey will tinker up their motor- 
car to make it run and carry them some- 
how or other to their journey’s end. 
We have never made peace, in the real 
sense of the word—that is, in Christ’s 
sense of the word—an ideal of our life, 
a definite bit of our programme. We 
have never felt urged to it, never, that is, 


123 


area” 


The Key to the Kingdom 


felt a strained relationship as He felt it— 
like a stab in the heart of a father watching 
his wrangling children, and much more 
concerned by the broken spirit of love 
than with anything else that might get 
broken. ‘Till we begin to feel strife as 


_ something dark and terrible, a denial of 


brotherhood, a shadow in the home, a 


black cloud upon the world, and not 


merely as an obstacle to our comfort or 
our convenience, we will never find the 
secret of peace—never enter into the 
blessedness of the peacemaker. 

Perhaps the deepest reason why peace 
so eludes us is that only by the spirit of 
the Kingdom can it be found. The 
making of peace is a task for the men who 
have the mind of Jesus and, in their hearts, 
the resources of His Spirit. All the skill 
and dexterity of diplomacy will not bring 
peace to the nations if there be nothing 
more. Peacemaking is more than a game 
of international chess. There are forces 
that make for strife, deep-rooted in 
history and in men’s blood, which take 


174 


The Peacemakers 


more to subdue them than the rose-water 
of a sweet reasonableness. They need, 
in truth, the powers of the heart which is 
drawing upon God’s wisdom and love. 
So Christ goes to the root of the matter 
and makes the task of peacemaking the 
burden of His own kind of men. What- 
ever else is, or is not, open to us, here is a 
task we must take a hand in. When the 
natives of Samoa cast about for some way 
of showing their gratitude to R. L. 
Stevenson for his kindness to them, they 
decided to build a road from his house 
to the village. Nothing could have been 
more symbolic of friendship than this 
removal of obstacles from the path by 
which he and they could come together. 
They were smoothing the way of fellow- 
ship. They called the new way the 
“Road of the Loving Heart.” While 
they were at it, a ship’s captain who was 
visiting the island, asked what they were 
doing. When they told him, his imagina- 
tion was touched, and he took off his 
coat saying, “I'd like to take a hand in 


175 


The Key to the Kingdom 


this job.” Surely that is how the work 
of the peacemaker appeals to every 
Christian. mind as imagination, in the 
light of the Kingdom of God, sees the 
glory of bringing men together. To 
create fellowship, to remove obstacles 
u ion it, that is our business. ‘The world 
is at present like a family without the 
family spirit. Its very intimacy is its 
peril as it is its opportunity. ‘here are 
forces in this close contact which will 
prove high-explosive to rend us, if we 
cannot find some way of so combining 
them as to make them a power for good; 
and, to put it on the lowest level, much 
would be won for the world if half the 
energy now spent in friction went to 
drive the wheels of service. ‘This creation 
of fellowship is the biggest task before 
our generation. How can we make it 
possible for men and women who at 
present “‘shout to one another across 
seas of misunderstanding” to ‘become a 
united family ? Only the Spirit of Christ 
can show the way. Into this He leads 


176 


The Peacemakers 


His Church, and there is no better way 
in which we can help to win men to a 
Tecognition of the Spirit of our Lord. 
*““ Blessed are the peacemakers, for they 
shall be called the children of God.” 
What is the method of the peacemaker ? 
The word suggests a conciliator—one 
who pours oil on troubled waters and 
calms the heat of strife. A great deal 
of peacemaking in a very real sense of 
the word can be done by one who thus 


carries a healing spirit. This is a world 


Where great storms arise about very little 
things. Much strife has its roots in the 
friction of opposing temperaments. There 
are people of whom we just make up our 
minds that we do not like them. “Ido : 
not like thee, Dr. Fell—the reason why, | 
I cannot tell.” Some little thing, per-— 
haps, has prejudiced us, as we say; which: 
simply means that we have judged the 
case before we were really in a position 
to do so, and before, therefore, we had 
any business to make up our minds. 
Nothing then such people can do or say 


12 177 


<, 


The Key to the Kingdom 


will win our approval or pass our censor- 


jous eye. Sharp words beget sharp 
words, and so the trouble spreads. And 
then the peacemaker—he of the gentle, 
reasonable spirit—may make peace, just 
by enabling us to see things in their true 
perspective. How small are the things 
we dispute about! What motes they 
are that have blurred our vision and 
brought the red mist to our eyes! 
“Every matter hath two handles,” said 
Epictetus. “By the one it may be 
carried. By the other not. If thy 
brother do thee wrong take not this thing 
by the handle ‘He wrongs me’ ; that 
is the handle by which it may not be 
carried. But take it rather by the handle 
‘He is my brother.? And thou wilt 
take it by a handle by which it may be 
carried easily.” That is the very spirit 


of Jesus; and it suggests one method 
‘of peacemaking—which is to help people 
‘ to look from the point of view of others. 


For just there the shoe pinches in the 
rough roads we walk together. Our 


178 


The Peacemakers 


minds grow self-centred. We think of 
ourselves, our own hurt dignity, our 
Own importance, and twist the tactless 
deed, or even the most inoffensive remark, 
into a deadly insult. There are various 
little ways in which at such times we can 
keep the peace, or make it. We can 
refuse at all costs to be offended. We 
can speak the quiet word, or pass off 
the awkward moment with some kindly 
humour. If it is we who seem to have 
been insulted, in the last resort we can 
ask ourselves whether there is any ground 
for our brother’s annoyance. If there be 
none, then we have to realize that he 
is only to be pitied, and to be helped by 
us when our help becomes possible. For 
the man who hates another does himself 
far more damage than any he may inflict 
on his foe. He is spoiling his own spirit. 
He is letting loose a madness in the brain 
which will sting his soul with a fiery 
disquiet. And therefore no one is so 
much in need of our help. What did 
Jesus really have-in view when He bade 


179 


The Key to the Kingdom 


us turn the other cheek and pray for 
those who do us wrong? Was it only 
to bid us beware lest we should become 
like our enemy by adopting his methods ? 
Was it not also this—that it is our business 
to create for the man who has wronged 
us the kind of atmosphere in which he 
can become a better man—the atmosphere 
in which the flame of anger cannot live. 
Love has no more blessed ministry than 
this—to keep down the frictions of life, to 
disarm the spirit of anger, to so interpret 
our fellows to each other that they can 
find the footing of friendship, and no 
ministry will produce a more immediate 
fruit. It is our business to be reconcilers. 
We are ambassadors for Christ, and as 
such He often sends us to help men to 
think kindly of one another ; for whenever 
men are truly reconciled _ one another, 
they are in a measure reconciled to Him. 

But Christ means far more than this 
when He speaks of peacemaking. Christ’s 
peace is much more than the quiet and 
frictionless harmony which comes through 


180 


The Peacemakers 


the restraint of temper and the subduing 
of pride. Peace is a very much deeper 
thing than mere tranquillity. We long 
for peace, but do we always realize its 
true nature and by what strange roads 
of disquiet it may have to come ? What 
we take for peace is sometimes, in Christ’s 
outlook, a poisonous thing, not the peace 
of abundant and harmonious life, but the 
peace of stagnation and death. There 
may be a peace in a home which looks very 
beautiful; but when you examine it 
you may find it only means that the 
members have ceased to concern them- 
selves deeply enough about each other to 
induce them to interfere. There may be 
peace in a Church because the members 
never get near enough in fellowship to 
cause friction, and are not really keen 
enough on the Kingdom of God to make 
trouble about anything. There was a 
peace in the old slave plantations, but 
what kind of peace? Was it the peace 
ofja real fellowship ? Was it not rather 
one of force and fear? Was it the peace 


181 


The Key to the Kingdom 


of people really at one? We may gauge 
its depth by their Civil War! | 

What is the peace of which Jesus 
speaks? It is that which is found when 
each of us is one with the others in the 
fellowship of a cause greater than all our 
differences, when all conflict of ambitions 
is swept away. It is the peace of a full, 
strong river seeking the sea, whose strife 
comes only of the passion of its movement, 
and is resolved immediately and lost in 
the fullness of its common life. It is 
the peace which follows where wrong 
which has been done is faced up to, and 
so put away—as alone it can be put away 
—by exposing it to the light of truth 
and love. And it is that peace which in 
the mind of Christ is always allied with 
righteousness. “The work of righteous- 
ness shall be peace,” said the prophet, 
and that word holds to-day. Righteous- 
ness is the root, and with the root the 
making of the peace of which Jesus speaks 
must begin. 
v Dispeace may come from two things— 

182 


The Peacemakers 


a wrong relation to God Who is our 
Father, or, at the same time also, a wrong 
relation to man who is our brother. 
Where this is the root of disquiet, no 
amount of good nature, or kindly feeling, 
or patient temper, will produce anything 
except an uneasy balance of opposing 
forces—where peace would be at the best 
only the deadly and ominous quiet of a 
gathered storm. Quietness for the sake 
of quietness is no real friend to peace. 
The real peacemaker must get down to 
the root. There are wounds which cannot 
be healed with any balm. ‘They must 
be opened to the light and air. The un- 
veiling of wrong and the resort to moral 
surgery is the making of peace, more surely 
than that which appears to be the peaceful 
way. “If ye walk in the light ye have 
fellowship with one another.” ‘The real 
peacemaker may often seem to be a 
stirrer-up of strife. Peace may often 
have to be broken on one level that it may 
be made de more surely deeper down. It is 
one of the great paradoxes of Christ— 


183 


The Key to the Kingdom 


one of the amazing things about him— 
that He seemed, by His coming, to break 
man’s peace. Matthew tells us that 
when He was born “ Herod was troubled 
and all Jerusalem with him.” Jesus knew 
chis kind of thing would be one of the first 
effects of His mission. “ Iam come,” He 
said, “not to send peace but a sword.” 
It seems hard to reconcile that with His 
blessing on the peacemakers. “I am 
come,’”’? He went on, ‘“‘to set a man 
against his father and a woman against her 
mother, and a man’s foes shall be they of 
his own household.” The paradox can 
be reconciled. The first effect of His 
truth in any heart is to make it aware of 
its own unworthiness and selfishness, and 
to break its calm with adeep unrest. And 
let a man, in a home where the spirit 
of the world is strong, become truly 
Christ-like, let the passion for goodness 
and purity take possession of him, and a 
light then begins to shine which shows 
up the selfishness, the easy tolerance of 
wrong, the vulgar ambition in which 


184 


The Peacemakers 


the family had been content to live. 
This man, with the truth of God in his 
heart, has become a living conscience 
which stings. He is like the picture by a 
real artist hung alongside pictures of 
vulgar taste, which necessarily and at 
once begins to fight with them. The 
man is alive to Christ and will often 
even passively awaken revolt against that 
new and challenging faith which has 
troubled the stagnant waters of the home. 
For the peace of a home like that is not 
the peace of fellowship; it is only the 
peace of moral indifference, against which 
Christ is come to set Himself. 

The same thing is true in the making of 
peace between class and -class. The real 
need is for righteousness. If men would 
only learn to be tolerant, and just make 
up their minds not to quarrel about things, 
_ what a fine peace on earth there would be! 

So we think. And a reasonable spirit 
would do much; it is the first essential. 
But it will not do everything. We some- 
times speak of the need of goodwill to 


185 


The Key to the Kingdom 


reach a settlement. But what we often 
mean by goodwill is just good temper and 
a kindly spirit which hates a dispute. Yet 
to try to bring peace to our social and 
industrial life simply by kindly sentiment 
is like trying to kill the poison of a swamp 
by planting flowers which will disguise the 
odour, instead of draining the soil. Good- 
will, in the meaning of Jesus, is no mere 
sentiment. It is good will—the will set 
on what is right. It is the spirit that 
wills good—and that the good of all—not 
merely selfish personal advantage. It is 
the spirit which can tolerate no wrong 
with an easy mind. So long as there is 
injustice, so long will there be dispeace. 
All doctrines of revolutionary force, and 
the men whose blood is bitten by them, 
flourish in the rank soil of injustice. So 
long as the poison of selfishness and wrong 
values infects people, so long will the 
wounds of friction fester and inflame. 
The true peacemaker is he who is out 
against injustice everywhere, whoever 
may be its slave. That was Christ’s way 


186 


The Peacemakers 


with social dispeace. He went to the 
root of the trouble—on one occasion with 
a word that stung and searched both the 
soul of the man who thought he was 
wronged, and the man who had wronged 
him. “Who made Me a judge or a 
divider over you?” He said. And then 
He went on as much as to say, “ You are 
never going to settle that kind of dispute 
by any sort of compromise or arbitration 
For you are both wrong. And the thing 
that is breaking your peace, though you 
do not know it, is not the wrong which 
you think has been done. It is the 
unbrotherly spirit, the covetous soul that 
is out, not for good, but for gain.” 
And Christ and His followers, seeking 
this way of making peace, were counted as 
people who “turned the world upside 
down.” So they did, by creating revolu- 
tions in the souls of men and distributing 
all the nicely-balanced forces there that 
kept things quiet. The true peacemaker 
must be like His Master: he must lift his 
voice against the things in our individual 


187 


The Key to the Kingdom 


and social life which are creating the unrest. 

The same thing is true of peace among 
the nations. We have still to learn that 
peace cannot stand unless it is founded on 
righteousness. A mere balance of power 
will never make a peace that will last. A 
shifty diplomacy that seeks to win a 
triumph in the moves of policy, and get 
its opponent into a corner, will never make 
a peace that will last. Nothing but the 
way of right, in scorn of consequence, will 
do it. For the world’s peace, like that 
between man and man, comes of a right 
spirit among the nations, and a due care 
for the rights of others. The real secret 
of world-peace lies in a new outlook, anew 
mind. It lies in the mind which gives a 
new meaning to such words as “ national 
prestige ”’ and “‘ honour,” and chases out 
of the word “‘ empire ” every note of the 
pride of dominion, to fill it with the pride 
of service. Peace will come only in the 
measure in which we learn to love our 
country as Christ loved His, with a passion 
for the place which it could hold in 


188 


The Peacemakers 


God’s Kingdom and for the mission it 
could serve in the world. How in this 
spirit to deal with the tangled situations 
that face us to-day is the difficult thing. 
That is where the politician turns on 
the apostle and asks questions. How can 
this peace which comes of righteousness 
find a home in the heart of Greek or 
Turk? How is this outlook to be adopted 
in the problems that arise in our shattered 
Europe ? And such questions baffle. Yet 
we must, in the first place, have the right 
outlook before any successful attempt 
can be made to solve them. Some 
problems will never arise for the man or 
the nation possessing something of the 
mind of Christ. Some affronts they will 
never see. ‘There is a way of righteous- 
ness which, if we are on the look-out for 
it, we shall find. The trouble often is 
that we fail to see where that way breaks 
off, till we are so far gone upon the other 
that it takes a crisis to reveal it, and a 
sacrifice, almost beyond what we can pay, 
to get back to it again. 


189 


The Key to the Kingdom 


Wherever we may be, in whatever 
situation, there is a Christian thing to do, 
and the Christian thing is the final way 
of peace. ‘That is as true for nations as it 
is for classes or individuals. It may be 
a hard way, or—what is often Just as 
trying—a new way. There may be old 
prejudices to shed, old possessions to 
abandon ; but our work is to create the 
spirit of fellowship in a world which is 
coming to live together as it never lived 
together before, and living so without 
understanding the principles that alone ~ 
make a common life possible. 

That is the task for Christian men. Itis 
one of the things Christ came todo. One 
of the first things Paul hailed in’Him was 
His power to reconcile the nations. “ Ye 
who were once afar off are made nigh by 
the blood of Christ,”? he wrote to the 
Gentiles—he who was a Jew. “ Having 
made peace through the blood of His 
Cross.” ‘That was the way, and that was 
the power. Jesus walked the way of the 
Cross for the gathering of the nations 


190 


The Peacemakers 


into the commonwealth of God. And 
the peacemaker to-day must tread it too. 
We must bring to the work of peace the 
same forces of the spirit which we poured 
into the channel of war—the initiative, 
the unselfishness, the willingness to take 
any place so long as the interests of the 
Kingdom come first; and when we do 
this, will there be any doubt of the issue ? 
Can there indeed be God’sown peace among 
the nations on lesser terms than these ? 
But if we are to seek this peace, which 
is the creation of a new fellowship, we 
must be equipped for it, and that equip- 
ment is nothing less than the peace of 
God in our own hearts. The career of 
St. Francis of Assisi is the story of a life 
given to peacemaking—to all kinds of 
reconciliations. One of his great anxieties 
was lest his disciples, having given up 
everything for a life of poverty, should 
allow the hard, self-righteous spirit to 
creep into their attitude to those who did 
not live on their plane, and so make gulfs 
where none need be. And his counsel to 


QI 


The Key to the Kingdom 


them as they went out to bring the touch 
of Christ’s healing spirit into a divided 
world is worth thinking over. ‘“ Our 
life in the midst of the world, ” he said, 
“ ought to be such that on hearing and 
seeing us every one shall feel constrained 
to praise our Heavenly Father. You pro- 
claim peace. Have it in your hearts. Be 
not an occasion of wrath or scandal to 
anyone, but by your gentleness may all 
be led to peace and concord.” We 
proclaim peace ; we must have it in our 
hearts. How can peace come there? 
Only by our trampling down and casting 
out whatever is against the rule of Jesus. 
Only by our letting him lay low our false 
values and subdue our animosities till we 
see men with the eyes of God. Only as 
the things for which men strive with one 
another lose their power to hold us 
prisoners, only as we see through the 
illusions of power, and possession, and 
pride, are we free to live in that spirit 
of brotherhood which draws men into 
fellowship. 


192 


The Peacemakers 


He drew a circle that shut me out, 
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. 

But love and I had the wit to win. 
We drew a circle that shut him in. 


That is the victory which in this sundered 
world, seething with all kinds of division, 
makes peace and creates fellowship, be- 
cause it conquers in the hearts of others the 
things that divide. Nothing can so give 
men the sense of God as a heart which is 
radiant with this living peace. And 
men are drawn to one another in the 
measure in which they are drawn to Him. 


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Cuapter IX 


THE PERSECUTED 





IX. The Persecuted > o 


“Blessed are they which are persecuted for 
righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the Kingdom 
of Heaven.” 


| Roe beatitude is specially difficult 

to understand because to-day it lies 
so far beyond the experience of most 
of us. It was a very vital word for the 
times when it was spoken. The lives 
of the disciples were spent in a perfect 
maelstrom of trouble—brought on them- 
selves through their loyalty to Christ, 
There were at least twelve to whom He 
was speaking these words of whom only 
one, so far as we can tell, died in his bed, 
whilst several went to the gibbet, like 
their master. In such ways they came 
to understand what Christ meant by the 
joy of the persecuted, and so they wrote 
down this beatitude in its various forms, 
and held it fast because they had come 


197 


The Key to the Kingdom 


to live by it and found that it was 
true. 

If we are frank with ourselves we will 
admit that this kind of blessedness does 
not come to the average professing Chris- 
tian of the twentieth century. This 
fact ought to give us furiously to think. 
Are we not missing here something vital 
in the experience of Christ, and missing 
it because something vital is wanting 
in our loyalty to Him? One thing is 
clear: Christ expected that loyal disciple- 
ship would get people into trouble. It is 
worth noting that this word comes at 
the end of the picture of the blessed life. 
It is as if Christ said when He had finished 
His description of it, “I have a warning 
to give you. If you are this kind of man, 
if you are pure in heart, and poor in 
spirit, and are out for righteousness with 
a hunger in your soul that is like an 
undying fire, you are going to get into 
all sorts of trouble. You will raise a 
storm. You will get people up in arms 
against you. Evil will try to crush you. 


198 


The Persecuted 


You will make many enemies.” That 
was the kind of thing He was constantly 
saying, and saying with an insistence that 
makes us of to-day search our hearts. 
* Beware when all men speak well of you. 
Beware lest at that point you have hidden 
your light, or trimmed the edge of truth.” 
“ Behold,” He said again, “I send you 
forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.” 
Of course it might be objected that we 
are living in days when the Spirit of 
Christ has so far conquered the world 
as to make persecution a thing of the past ; 
that the world has learned to tolerate 
contrary opinions: that we have advanced 
to a greater trust in the power of truth, 
if not to a larger charity towards oppo- 
nents. It may also be said that a good 
many of the persecutions of history were 
needlessly aggravated ; that some of the 
martyrs were bigots of obtuse temper, 
using language that might provoke their 
foes. One phrase in this beatitude should 
make us careful, if we meet with dislike, 
before we lay the flattering unction to our 


ee 


The Key to the Kingdom 


souls that we are of those whom Christ 
calls “blessed.” It is the phrase “ for 
righteousness’ sake.”” Christ is very clear 
about this: ‘‘ for My sake,” He says again. 
There are Christian people who are dis- 
liked, not for their Christianity, but for 
the want of it; not because they are 
right, but because they are loveless or 
tactless. ‘They ask for trouble by a pug- 
nacious temper, or a rude manner, or a 
bitter tongue. It is not their goodness 
which hurts; it is their pride and their 
hardness: these prevent that goodness 
winning a way for Christ. ‘Their Chris- — 
tianity has not penetrated deeply enough 
to thaw their own heart ; their influence 
is not a breath of warm life from the land 
of sunshine, but a blast from an icefield. 

When all that, however, is said, it is 
clear that even in these humaner days 
a real loyalty to Christ will bring perse- 
cution. ‘The thumbscrew and the rack 
have their refined modern equivalents. 
However high the world may reach in 
the standard of life, those who are follow- 


200 


The Persecuted 


ing Christ will always be a little way 
ahead, holding out for the impossible. 
However far on we move in moral or 
spiritual advance, Jesus will always be 
ahead of us. We have learned enough of 
His supremacy to know that every new 
step forward is but a discovery of some 
fresh beam of His truth which was waiting 
to break out. So the Cross “leads the 
generations on.” It is a question whether 
the true Church can ever hope to be any- 
thing but an unpopular remnant, a com- 
pany of fools for Christ’s sake. 

Now a living goodness which has in it 
the salt of Christ’s message will often do 
one of two things: it will either convert 
the evil heart or rouse it to battle. A 
live Christian spirit is a real rebuke to 
wrong wherever it meets it. A Chris- 
tian man is an incarnate conscience in 
the community in which he lives. He 
lets in a flood of light. He introduces 
a new standard of values. One of the 
reasons why Christ was hated was just 
that He was what He was. His life was 


201 


The Key to the Kingdom 


a silent judgment seat. He quickened 
men’s consciences, and many a ghost 
which they imagined had been laid for 
ever, He set walking through the rooms 
of memory. Men saw themselves; and 
the sight was not flattering to pride. 


There came a man—whence, none could tell, 
Bearing a touchstone in his hand ; 

And tested all things in the land 

By its unerring spell. i 
And lo, what sudden changes smote 
The fair to foul, the foul to fair! 
Purple nor ermine did he spare, 
Nor scorn the dusty coat. 


But though they slew him with a sword 
And in a fire his touchstone burned, 

Its doings could not be o’erturned, 

Its undoings restored. 


When the light of Christ begins to move 
in a man’s soul either he submits and comes 
to Him, or else he begins to hate Him, 
to feel he must get rid of Him, because 


202 


The Persecuted 


there is no peace in His presence. The 
persecution of Christ is the finest tribute 


to His influence. ‘There must have been / 


something about His message and person- 
ality very powerful and penetrating, when 
men combined all their forces, both civil 
and ecclesiastical, and sunk the animosities 
of centuries, in order to put Him to death. 
That we should be hated by some people 
would be a big testimony to the vitality 
of our Christianity. It would mean 
that our goodness was alive enough to 
quicken the evil in their resentment. 
The fever in the sick body shows the 
presence of the poison, but it shows also 
that healing forces are active in an effort 
to cure. “ ‘The Kingdom of Heaven,” 
said Jesus, “‘ is like leaven which a woman 
hid in ten measures of meal.”? He had 
often seen it in His home, fomenting, 
bubbling through the still and lifeless 
dough. The process of leavening the 
life of the world will always be like that. 
It will create unrest. It will make dis- 
peace. Good and evil, truth and false- 


203 


The Key to the Kingdom 


hood cannot mix. We often think of 
love as a reconciling power, pouring oil 
on troubled waters, cooling friction. And 
it is so, if its way be not obstructed by 
evil. But the love of Jesus is a moral 
passion which will make no terms with 
evil, and the more deeply it reaches, the 
more it demands the clean heart and 
the right spirit. In the face of wrong, 
true love is a consuming fire. The Cross 
of Christ is the measure of a love which 
stood the test of hatred and pain and death, 
but it is also the measure of love’s 
antagonism to evil. 

And it is not always the antagonism 
of those who do not see the Christian 
values which we have to expect. It is 
that rather of those who have come to 
see, and whose antagonism is the reflection 
of their own internal conflict. ‘* Con- 
sider,” says the writer to the Hebrews, 
“‘Him who endured such contradiction 
of sinners against Himself”; or as it is 
translated with equal authority, “ against 
themselves.”’ Jesus created an inward 


204. 


The Persecuted 


conflict of which He had to bear the brunt, 
and there is no exemption from this for 
His disciples. 

- But, apart from this, selfishness and 
other forms of evil have a way of entrench- 
ing themselves in all sorts of interests 
and fighting there to retain their hold. 
There is the money interest which a 
live Christianity will threaten in various 
directions. The story of the rise of 
persecution in the book of Acts shows that 
interest as very much alive. When Paul 
began to preach in Ephesus—the centre 
of the worship of the goddess Diana—the 
people saw at once to what his doctrine 
was leading. It meant the overthrow 
of that worship, and the worship gone, 
its trade gone also. There would be no 
work for the image makers, and the silver- 
smiths would lose their custom, so at 
once there was opposition. And have we 
not to-day the same kind of opposition 
to meet? What, for instance, of the 
trafic in drink? How much of the 
Opposition to temperance reform is due 


205 


The Key to the Kingdom 


to the money interest? The traffic, 
too, in arms? ‘The war-spirit has several 
roots which will need to be cut before 
there can be any assurance of peace. And 
one of the roots is the money sunk in 
armament factories. So long as there 
are people whose dividends and profit 
depend on keeping alive the fear of war, 
the movement towards peace among the 
nations will have its foes, and determined 
opposition will face those who embark 
on this movement. 

But other kinds of vested interests 
stand in the way of righteousness. ‘There 
is the interest of governments. ‘The old 
battle between Church and State has 
gone on for centuries. Sometimes the 
fight dies down for want of some definite 
moral issue. But again and again a 
living Christianity will be found to clash 
with the policy of the State. Repeatedly 
the followers of Christ have had to 
take their stand against it. They have 
been called unpatriotic—traitors to their 
country—the foes of order and security. 


206 


The Persecuted 


They will be called so again, whenever, 
in response to the higher way of Jesus, 
they feel compelled to refuse what the 
State may ask, and persecution will follow. 
The interests of ordered government 
helped to bring Christ before Pilate. He 
was threatening the supremacy of the 
Roman Empire, so it was alleged. “ If 
you let this man go, you are not Cesar’s 
friend.” He was called unpatriotic by 
the people of His own nation, for His 
message was that of God’s love, not for 
them alone, but for all men. He taught 
that higher patriotism which consists not 
in masterful dominion but in lowly 
service, and it sharpened the nails that 
fastened Him to His Cross. 

Sometimes the instrument of perse- 
cution has been the Church itself. Reli- 
gion becomes organized. The practice 
of Christianity becomes a mere con- 
vention. Its faith that was once the 
fire of a living experience becomes har- 
dened into a creed, into a form of words 
which is insufficient for the living spirit 


207 


The Key to the Kingdom 


of truth, and may even deny the new 
light that has dawned. Christ taught us 
that the Spirit would lead us into new 
truth and unfold the deeper meanings 
of His message, and when that Spirit 
demands a new statement to shake the 
truth free of the husk and express a 
living experience, antagonism is sure to 
arise. Conventional people do not like 
to feel the breath of reality sweeping 
through customs which have grown dear, 
or to be jolted out of their familiar ruts 
of thought by the making of new tracks. © 
The commonplaces of to-day were the 
heresies of yesterday but there is nothing 
people so easily forget. Less than a 
hundred years ago George Canning de- 
scribed to a listening House of Commons 
how he had gone to a little Presbyterian 
church in London and heard a phrase’ 
which had haunted him ever since; it 
was “the Fatherhood of God.” Not 
much longer ago, for proclaiming that 
truth, men were hunted from their 
pulpits; and yet it is the very centre 
208 


The Persecuted 


of Christ’s message. Thus the Spirit of 
God leads us on. Jesus is ever being 
rediscovered, but wherever His truth’ 
leads into new territory, and opens up 
new aspects, there will be bitterness 
and conflict. 

And what of business and commercial 
life to-day? What of our social con- 
ventions? What of the ways of thinking 
in which we look out at one another 
through mists of suspicion or fear? 
pons! of: God,?? Children’ of “the 
Father,” “Brethren for whom Christ 
died ”—these are phrases which have in 
them tremendous explosive power, and 
they cut right across many of our con- 
ventional social attitudes and business 
relationships. And further, and wider, 
“neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond 
nor free, but all one in Christ Jesus.” 
There—in that—is another great seed 
of Christian thinking which is bound to 
rend the rocks of old prejudices, and make 
tremendous changes in our international 
outlook, and our ways of treating other 


sy 209 


The Key to the Kingdom 


nations. And the changes which this 
new outlook demands cannot be made 
without trouble. The way of a Christian 
man can never be easy to find or to follow. 
He will be here and there up against 
methods and practices which are incon- 
sistent with his faith. How far he can 
acquiesce in a system which he may 
feel to be unchristian is a matter for a 
man’s own conscience. No one can 
shut his eyes to the fact that a radical 
Christianity would involve changes. The 
difficulty is that these, made suddenly, 
would produce dislocations which are 
themselves disastrous. To use a familiar 
illustration, we are in the position of a 
railway company which has to change 
its method of working a big station and 
at the same time keep the train service 
running at full pressure. It is only bit 
by bit that the Christian outlook can 
become supreme and come to regulate 
the common life. Yet every pioneer must 
be ready to face the hazard of pioneering. 
The way forward is always, for the first 


2I0 


The Persecuted 


people who take it, both dangerous and 
lonely. He who would follow Christ 
must be prepared to take risks and face 
individual loss) He must be ready to 
walk alone, to face the disapproval of a 
majority, to become a fool for Christ’s 
sake. | 

The way of Christ to-day may not bring | 
the old form of persecution, but who shall 
say that the modern way is any less hard ? 
There are people who would face death 
and physical suffering for their faith more 
readily than the chill of social ostracism, 
the sneer of the club or of the drawing- 
room, the scorn which dismisses them 
as cranks. 


So he died for his faith. That was fine: 
More than most of us do. 

But say this, can you add to this line, 
That he lived for it too? 


But to live every day, to live out 
All the truth that he meant ; 

While his friends met his conduct with doubt 
And the world with contempt. 


211 


The Key to the Kingdom 


“They that live godly shall suffer perse- 
cution,”’ said the apostle, and he had tried 
it. There are points where our ways 
diverge. There are scruples to which a 
Christian man will bow which are folly 
to him who has not heard the still small 
voice. ‘There are sacrifices a Christian 
man will make that look very foolish in 
the face of world-glittering values and 
of what it calls success. ‘There are things 
we will do that appear quixotic, where 
we would fain justify ourselves but cannot, 
and we have just got to bear it. Perhaps - 
we never realize how deeply ingrained 
is the fear of public scorn, or the craving 
for public approval, till we are called to 
a way which runs right up against the 
ordinary thinking of those around us, 
and we have to go out on that way alone. 
And as we look at it, it is hard enough 
to realize that it is a way of “‘ blessedness.”? 
What then did Jesus mean by calling it 
that? What did He mean when He 
bade us rejoice and be exceeding glad in 
taking it? It is a matter of experience, 
212 


The Persecuted 


But one or two things become clear when 
we think it out. 

For one thing, the way of truth and | 
righteousness is its own blessedness. We 
say that often enough to ourselves. It 
is a truism. But we do not realize it till 
all the other props which support us 
are down, till all the other approvals 
in which we have sunned our souls are 
gone, and we are left alone with nothing 
but the cold, dark way, unlit and starless. 
Then, as we walk it, a light begins to shine, 
and a music is heard within which was 
drowned and dumb when we were listen- 
ing for the applause of others. The 
Christian way is like putting out to sea. 
We may believe that the great waters will 
carry us, and the great winds move us, 
and that the ship on which we sail is sea- 
worthy. But we do not know the real 
assurance and the triumph of the great 
adventure till we have gone out and taken 
the risk. It is a real fact that Chris- 
tianity never becomes vital in its joy and 
power for a man till he does something 


213 


The Key to the Kingdom 


by way of venturing everything on it. 
Then when he steps out in his lonely 
independence, with nothing but God for 
his portion, he finds a reality in religion 
that he had never experienced before. 
See what persecution did for the Early 
Church! It was when the Early Church 
was hunted and harried by Saul and 
those like him, that it really began to live 
on its faith and to grow into power. 
The comfortable nest of fellowship in 
which they had nourished their souls was 
broken and the members were scattered © 
abroad. But in that scattering they 
carried the truth and the faith into other 
parts of the world, and on their journeys 
realized for the first time the amazing 
resources of their Lord. For as they went 
He joined Himself to their company, and 
they found in His presence that their 
faith was not a mere hothouse plant 
which could only be kept alive in 
shelter, but a living thing whose roots 
went down into the everlasting springs. 
Faith grew the stronger when nothing 


214 ‘ 


The Persecuted 


but the strand of faith bound them to 
Him. ‘The presence of Christ became 
real, as it always does, to those who trust 
Him in a great loyalty that has nothing 
else to trust. Persecution, scorn, dis- 
approval—the cold winds that seem to 
threaten faith—are just the things which 
strengthen it. Faith is a torch which 
shines the brighter the more it is shaken. 
Said the great Tertullian, “‘ We are made 
- the more, the more you mow us down.” 
But there is more. ‘There is the : 
comfort of belonging to a great succession. 
“For so persecuted they the prophets 
that were before you.” It is a great 
thing to carry on a noble tradition. It 1s 
the kind of pride which sleeps in every 
patriotic heart and has helped many a 
man to be strong in a strange land, on 
the battlefield, in the desert. ‘The Chris- 
tian man’s tradition yields a far deeper 
pride. No lineage is nobler than his: 
he belongs to the order of faith, to the 
succession of the saints and prophets, to 
the line of the spiritual pioneers, whose 


215 


The Key to the Kingdom 


Captain is Christ Himself. He is break- 
ing ground, he will say to himself, in 
which, for people yet unborn, the seeds 
of truth and right will grow. He is 
lighting a fire which will yet illumine 
the world. He is a pioneer in new ter- 
ritory which Christ will call His own. 
The outpost which he is holding will yet 
become the centre of a colony. The 
thought he thinks, and for which he 
suffers to-day, will be the food on which 
the world will live to-morrow. The vice 
against which he alone stands to-day will 
take its death-blow from the wound 
which he receives in fighting it. That 
is the message of the Cross. 

It is from the want of all this that the 
Church is suffering to-day. We lack 
the something which the opposition of 
the world would give us. No one sighs 
for the old days of the bloody perse- 
cutions, but the Church is God’s pioneer 
into new truth, into new places of 
conquest. Is it not because she is not 
vital enough to be dangerous that the 


216 


The Persecuted 


world so often treats her with indifference? 
When she begins to stand up te evil, to 
speak out fearlessly against it, and to take 
her Christianity seriously, the world will 
take her seriously, and she will begin to 
count. It will heed her then, if only to 
try in some form or other to put her down. 
That will be the greatest compliment 
which it can pay her—except to open its 
mind to her message. “ Then,” says 
Jesus, “rejoice and be exceeding glad.” 
The world’s persecution of the truth has 
always preceded its submission to it. 
The day of suffering and opposition is 
the dawn of conquest. When you are 
walking the way of the Cross, you are on 
your way to the Resurrection and the 
Throne. And “ Lo, I am with you alway, 


even unto the end.?”? 


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